Meanwhile, in real life, we don't have space wizards who can perform magic, yet we have generals who live in fear of magical leaders of make believe religions.
Don't be silly, every moon-sized station has a hole that destroys the entire structure if someone drops a rock in there. That's the way it's always been done. That is industry best practices according to our stakeholders.
Vader: "Oh I guess it doesn't hurt since it's all bullshit, huh? I find your lack of faith disturbing. Especially since you've seen me do this shit, like, a million times before."
Wasn't he more criticizing the scale? Like, a sith warrior is great, but he can't really compete with the power of the Death Star when it comes to sheer scale. Just ask Alderaan.
When I saw this scene as a kid, I thought Motti coughed up the yellow button on the console. I didn't know what it was at the time and thought Vader somehow put some yellow choking pill inside him. It was very disturbing to me. This was before I knew what a Force choke was.
The galactic empire (and the republic before it) spanned billions of inhabited star systems. If each world was billions or trillions of inhabitants that means the galactic population is 1018 or more people. There were only ~10,000 Jedi at their peak. The chances of any galactic citizen seeing a Jedi, unless they lived on Coruscant near the temple, are vanishingly small. They were mythical beings to almost everyone.
I'm going off what was in the movies and other than Coruscant there's nothing to suggest there's that many individuals. There are a lot of representatives in the senate but that doesn't say much about how populated the planets are.
And, the Jedi had an actual HQ on the home planet of the republic, didn't they?
EDIT: And as another counter-example, there's not that many Secret Service agents but most people in Earth probably know they exist.
I am not familiar with star wars canon lore, but I am very familiar with astronomical data and I have a well-enough grasp of logistics. So I strongly doubt that any civilization would be able to administrate more than a few tens of thousands of star systems, no matter how efficient they are.
Suddenly that massive Galactic Senate Chamber seems cartoonishly tiny. Was the galactic Republic just a dictatorial empire to the high hundreds of millions of worlds/systems that didn't have a senate pod from which to be heard/represented?
The Jedi by that point were as accessible as the heads of the Catholic Church. To most poor people throughout the galaxy, the Jedi didn't give a shit about you or your suffering, notice how they didn't do shit about slavery in the galaxy? To most people the Jedi were nothing but self righteous religious do nothings that live in a big palace
Imagine you were to do this shit after someone talking about how Jesus will strike sinners down, then suddenly a buff Jesus appears and chokes you out a little bit. Thats what this guy went through.
I don’t think he wasn’t believing in the force, he knew Jedi were real, he just wasn’t buying the mysticism surrounding it and didn’t think it’s such a big deal. He knew Vader is a powerful force user, but the Death Star is literally one shotting entire planets, so the force didn’t feel that significant to him in the grand scheme of things.
He said he didn't know about the force before he even knew the Death Star existed.
I think it's very silly to think there is a galactic civilization but the people in that civilization don't know, even though there's absolutely no secret about it, that magic exists.
Is Han really that ignorant of what's going on around him? I doubt he'd be that effective a smuggler if he didn't pay attention to news and politics.
How many Jedi are there during their peak? I think it's around ten thousand jedi. Compared to the galaxy population of 100 quadrillion sentient beings spread across the galaxy, I'm not too surprised a lot of people thought they're a myth.
but unlike most religion, being a jedi or sith comes with real superpowers that you can use to choke, shock, or push the non-believers without touching them
People are complaining about Motti not knowing Jedi were real. But how many times did we see things written down, much less recorded video/holograms?
In this essay on how recorded media was made illegal by the Empire to clamp down on shared knowledge and control the public, I will prove without a doubt...
He would have been in the military during the Clone Wars. They served as Generals in the Republic armies. If he had not witnessed the exploits of the Jedi first hand, he most likely would have seen and heard the reports.
Motti's ambitions, which grew in the wake of the battle station's completion, were short-lived, however. The Rebel Alliance, who had obtained a copy of the Death Star plans during the Battle of Scarif, discovered a weak spot in the station's thermal exhaust port and successfully exploited it, leading to the destruction of the battle station along with the deaths of everyone onboard, Motti included.
He was correct too in a way. It wasn't The Force that was keeping the Galaxy in line, it was economic and logistical power. If anything, it was the Sith's constant need for conflict and backstabbing seeping into the officer corps that hampered The Empire, and the Tarkin Doctrine is what happens when you base your military strategy on the whims and wishes of an autocratic religious fanatic.