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Rhea Dee is a Midwestern fat girl floating through space with a donut and an attitude. She's the co-host and co-creator of the podcast Badland Girls. 7 Comments
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There’s a couple ways they could be going with this religion thing. Firstly, when a religion no longer serves the needs of it’s people, the people generally look for a new religion. Irish and Norse paganism are good examples: native peoples voluntarily gave up their religion for Xianity simply because human sacrifices and unanswered prayers and endless rituals no longer did it for them. Arab paganism went down with slightly more of a fight when Islam came along, but really not all that much. So if the Colonials are abandoning the gods, it’s because the gods no longer have any relevance to them.
Another posibility is Hegelian synthesis: You’ve got a group that eventually evolves into two groups, they come into conflict, fight, and in the end the survivors integrate into a new cohesive whole, which eventually breaks down into two groups in the distant future and the process begins again. Kind of like, oh, I dunno, humans creating cylons, cylons killing off most of humanity, then integrating; and then there’s that constant reminder that “All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.”
Gotcha. It’s not “all of this has happened before” in a literal sense, as in The Matrix. But, the process of splitting and uniting has happened repeatedly. It never occurred to me to take that perspective, which makes more sense than taking it literally.
Happy to be of service.
Slightly off topic, but here’s something that I’ve wondered about for a while: it’s apparent that the ancestors of the Colonials got thrown off Kobol before ending up on the Colonies, and now they’ve gotten thrown out of the Colonies, presumably to end up on Earth. So they talk about “The gods” quite a bit, even in conjunction w/ living alongside them on Kobol. So what were these gods, anyway? Mere legends, or maybe early sentient machines? And if the Lords of Kobol were actually early AIs who rebelled, what happened to ‘em? Are they still around? Are they still involved in the story somehow? Are they related to the Final Five somehow? Or the Cylons own God?
I think Baltar’s arc will show us something of the gods of Kobol. He’s developed his following, and as his story and teachings are passed down, he’s likely to make that mythical jump from man to god in the minds of his followers. It will take generations for that to happen, but down the line, I think Baltar will be the one god the colonials pray to. The gods of Kobol were probably just people like Baltar: charismatic leaders who later came to be thought of as gods.
James Michner’s book The Source explores that idea quite a bit. It’s a really interesting read, if you have the fortitude.
I dunno how I feel about that. Monotheistic religions are pretty uncomfortable w/ the idea of a God in human form. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, and Baha’I have all rebelled pretty stridently from that idea. The whole point of Monotheism seems to be to remove the filters of perception that stand between an individual and The Divine – you know, pull down the stained glass windows in the church and stare at the sun directly, that kind of thing. Prophets, sure, the Son of God, ok, maybe just this once, but God Himself? Not so much. Of cours this is an SF show, so I could be totally off base about this, I guess it just depends on wether RDM went to Church/Temple/Mosque as a kid, or just read Campbell in college.
Maybe not necessarily God in human form, but a person who, through retelling over centuries or millennia, becomes part of the general consciousness and is believed to have been a god, whether he actually was or not. There’s also the possibility that BSG is saying that religion is a construction of man and the object of that religion doesn’t exist.
Oh yeah, it’s entirely possible that the entire religion aspect of BSG is simply rats running around in a computerized maze, seeing how most effectively to manipulate people (“Do we give ‘em free will, or merely tell them they have free will?”) and definitely, A-list religious reformers tend to get deified over time, but I do think it’s imporant to point out that Muslims don’t think Mohammed is/was/will be God; that the Sikhs don’t believe Guru Nanak to be God, that Christians don’t pray to Jesus, even though He’s God’s Son, but rather pray to God directly, and so on.
BTW, I’m pointing this out only because most SF fans aren’t particularly religious, and many are actively opposed to religion (I can’t tell you how many of my atheist friends simply couldn’t get past the religious blather on Babylon 5 and abandoned the show because of it). Since a lot of us have no first-hand experience w/ such things, and are operating on heresay which may or may not be accurate, and might confuse the hell out of things if they try to apply it a story thread or metaphor or whatever in a TV show. For instance, if someone says that based on their second-hand understanding of a book they probably never read, Jesus hated Jews, or that Mohammed hated Christians and therefore we can predict thus-and-so will happen later on in the season, you can call bullshit on that simply because people who’ve actually read the books know that (A) Jesus was Jewish himself and never said anything bad about it, and (B) Mohammed was married to a Christian girl. Wow…Having actually written that all out rather than just thinking it in my caffine-filled braine, it sounds remarkably pedantic.
Geez. Sorry.
Incidentally, surfing IO9 a little bit ago I found this paraphrase of a conversation w/ RDM:
>>> Caprica Six will have a “very interesting year”. Also, Baltar? Not Jesus. “That’s not what the show’s about,” apparently. <<<
Here’s the link, if anyone wants to look at it. Be wary of spoilers, though!
http://io9.com/387890/cylons-just-as-frakked-as-ever-says-producer