Khaat wrote:Then Obi-Wan must have really cooked your goose when he dropped the "certain point of view" bomb in RotJ.
Two very different things. Obi-wan was saying that his version of Anakin's story was technically true/open to interpretation. He was not saying that everything is relative and that their is no good or evil.
That, or he was just trying to smooth over his own lie.
Also, remember that this is the man who said "Only a Sith deals in absolutes"... which is itself an absolute.
Obi-wan's words should not be taken at face value.
The light (knowledge, defense) and the dark (anger, fear, aggression) aren't divisible from actual people,
What do you mean by that?
If you mean that good and evil both exist in individual people, well then yes, obviously.
If you mean that their is no metaphysical good or evil in the Force, but that its all down to the individual, then you are pretty much objectively wrong according to canon. See the Mortis Arc from The Clone Wars, off the top of my head. Which had anthropomorphic personifications of the Light and Dark Side. Not a depiction I particularly cared for, but their it is.
and the Jedi Order didn't even agree what those meant. Qui-Gon wasn't in sync with the Council because he followed "the Living Force", not their traditions. Yet the Force guided him to Anikin.
Again, you are equating two different things.
Following the Living Force as opposed to the Unifying Force or whatever is a distinct question from weather a Light and Dark Side exist. Qui-Gon, to my knowledge, never denied
that.
If your point is that the Jedi are fallible, so their views on the Force cannot be trusted, well, no shit.
Which is why its so handy that their are examples of the Light and Dark side that don't rely on word of Jedi to support them.
We did have Yoda pretty much call it out in Ep II, that the Jedi Order had become ineffective in their mission: they had been manipulated into a galactic civil war (and then continued to drop the ball for a few years more, before being wiped-out.)
Again, the Jedi are fallible. This does not mean that their is no Light or Dark Side.
I think a lot of people (I have seen this argument before), mistakenly, or disingenuously, equate "Jedi" and "Light Side", and then use the flaws of the Jedi as proof that their is no Light Side, or that the Light Side is in the wrong. This is another false equivalency.
The Jedi try to follow the Light Side, but they are ultimately ordinary living beings, and hence fallible. That they make mistakes does not invalidate the notion that their is a Light Side, and a Dark Side.
My read is that the First Temple isn't so much about how the Sith came to be, but what the Jedi were meant to be (or not to be*), without the resulting traditions layered-on over millennia.
This is plausible, in and of itself.
I have to wonder (or speculate, whatever) if the Jedi were just temple guards that weren't supposed to get training in the Force, just protect the Whills from day-to-day distractions, and one day, one guard learned he had Force potential and became the first of the "karma police", and caused all the Force-enhanced conflict to follow. Okay, that sounds a lot like the Peacekeepers in Farscape. Eh.
“Always pass on what you have learned.” – Yoda
“You must unlearn what you have learned.” – Yoda
*that is the question

The thing is, because the Dark Side corrupts, and because people are, in general, not immune to the temptation to give in to evil impulses, its pretty much inevitable that if you have Force users, some will fall, and do terribly things, and that that will cause conflict, without needing to bend over backward to blame it all on the Jedi. And likewise, their will pretty much have to be some rules and enforcement.
Your argument amounts to saying "Their would be no crime or war if we just got rid of all the damn cops and laws and ethics."
Bluntly, it seems to me that you are ignoring and misrepresenting canon to try to make the Star Wars universe's rules conform to your preferred philosophical view. Their are other fictional universes where it might fit better, but not Star Wars, where metaphysical good and evil exist
and that is integral to the setting and story.
If you don't like it, go write your own universe with whatever rules you please.