Up, Down and All Around

Musings on God(s)

Pulled an all-nighter yesterday to finish watching the first season of (the re-imagined) Battlestar Galatica. Woohoo! What a ride! And what a cliffhanger ending! Bitin na bitin! LOL. Can't wait to get my hands on Season 2 episodes.

For those who are not familiar with the show, the main gist of the storyline is (to borrow from the OBB of each episode): Man created cylons. The cylons rebelled. They evolved. They now look and feel like humans. They now walk among humans. And they have a plan.

After the rush of excitement from watching the series wore off, I found myself wondering a lot about the theology behind the series.

The humans in the series are portrayed as the good guys. Obviously, we relate to them since we are human too. They are polytheistic -- they pray to multiple gods and use the term the "Gods of Kobol" in reference to their pantheon of deities. Their gods sound like our usual Roman / Greek gods -- Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite.

In contrast, the cylons are monotheistic -- they believe in the "one true God" and believe they are carrying out God's will when they wage war to destroy all of humanity. They consider themselves "instruments of God" and they become upset when humans mock their notion of a one true God.

Being monotheistic myself, I find the incongruity of it all as disturbing as it is fascinating. Figured there should be quite a bit of discussion about this topic online, so I did some surfing and found a few interesting links:

• Official Battlestar Galatica site
• Battlestar Galatica and Mormonism. Article by Michael Lorenzen. Focuses on original series
• The Theology of Battlestar Galatica. Interview with Ron Moore, executive producer of the reimagined series.
• The Religion of Galatica. Article on Now Playing Magazine

The timing of my watching this show is a bit uncanny since I'd been questioning some of my own beliefs in the past few weeks. Don't get me wrong -- I believe in God, but there are some aspects of my belief system that I feel need re-examination, because some things don't make all that much sense. And other things are just too difficult to swallow on the basis of faith alone.

Tags: TV, Religion

Posted by CF at 11:55 PM