January 19, 2009

• The Theology of Battlestar Galactica: Thoughts on Week One.

  WARNING!  Do not read if you haven’t seen the first episode yet, this post contains plot spoilers.

  

   

  One of the things that I love about Battlestar Galactica is how the writers take dogma and turn it upside down, making proverbial molehills out of mountains, swapping Technicolor with sepia and making the dewey decimal system and Google one and the same.  After all, since season one we have seen robots give birth to babies that look human, good guys immolating themselves as suicide bombers and fighter pilots morphing into politicians.  However, what has impressed me the most is how BSG has forced us to examine religion and the concept of what it really means to be human.

   

  In the beginning things are quite cut and dry.  Good guys = humans.  Bad guys = cylon robots.  After that it all goes downhill…in an M.C. Escher kind of way.  The humans, the good guys, are polytheistic.  The cylons, the bad guys now in metal as well as flesh form, are monotheistic.

   

  WHAT, CHICKEN BUTT?!

   

  That’s quite a switch, no?  These days, monotheism (Judaism and Christianity in the western world, Islam in the middle east) is the predominant theology.  Polytheism has been relegated from religion to mythology, thunderous gods banished to bedtime stories and late night cable reruns.  BSG is not shy about the polytheism of the humans, with many references to “the gods,” but why use Hellenic deities for the good guys and the “one true God” for the bad guys?  After all, wasn’t it the Romans—polytheists whose liturgy bleeds Hellenic—that fed the monotheistic Christians to the lions?  In Judeo-Christian dogma, it is God’s chosen people who came first before the polytheistic Romans they were tortured and murdered by…only to be used by God to save them in the end.

   

  Does this make the cylons the Jews (Gods chosen people, from whom Jesus Christ arose out of) and the humans the wayward gentiles pre-conversion?  Another alternative religious corollary is that the cylons and humans are like Isaac and Ishmael, half-brothers that formed the human fork in the road of history between Christianity and Islam, with each believing his way to be the only Way, leading to centuries of bloodletting, much like the 13^th tribe splitting off from the original 12.

   

  Before you think I’m crazy or too much of a BSG dork (okay…too late for that), consider these other parallels:

  • 2,000 years ago there was the nuclear attack on Earth.  2000 years ago Christ was crucified.  And yet through both people were able to be reborn again.
  • President Roslin is a messianic figure, per the prophecy leading her people to the promised land…and to her own death.
  • The cylon named Number Six is the most seductive of all, with one gaining the codes needed for the holocaust from Baltar, another seduced Colonel Tigh and another was the leader of the breakaway cylon faction.  That’s 666, if you will.
  • Baltar, who became a religious figure in the later seasons, proselytizes for the cylon God to his human followers, proving that the cylon religion transcends race.
  • Grace Park is mad beautiful.  (Just wanted to throw that in somewhere. )
  • The twelve colonies could be a reference to the twelve disciples.  The thirteenth colony?  Jesus Christ, their leader.  

  But what does the journey and subsequent discovery of Earth by a combined team of Jews and gentiles—cylons and humans—tell us?  And why in the world does Dualla kill herself?!?!?!  To answer that question we need to revisit the question of what it means to be human.  The humans, of course, reproduce the old fashioned way.  The cylons at the onset of BSG could reproduce only by building more robots.  Experiments to use human ovaries to produce cylon-human hybrid progeny were unsuccessful…until Boomer and Helo produced a child.  To make the logic even murkier, Colonel Tigh got one of the Number Six cylons pregnant.  Yes, the Colonel Tigh who was later revealed to be one of the embedded cylons, so that makes two cylons producing a child together (well, an unfinished pregnancy since that Number Six was later killed).  The thought is that the missing link was love.  Love, and not science, is what is needed to produce life.  Members of the 13^th tribe who died on Earth were excavated and were found to be, surprisingly, cylons and not humans.  Ergo, the 13^th tribe 2,000 years ago were cylons who coexisted with humans before they left the other twelve colonies to be on their own.  But how can that be, since it was originally thought that the humans created the cylons…unless there really is no difference between human and cylon.  Perhaps cylon and human were once one and the same, much like we all used to be, before pride and prejudice arbitrarily separated us all by race, creed and class.

   

  It turns out that we’re all sons of Abraham, after all.  We are all of the same blood, and neglecting that fact is why we continue to fight amongst ourselves to this day.

   

  So why did Dualla kill herself?  When she dug up the jacks she must have had a flashback like Chief Tyrol (wall shadow) and Sam Anders (guitar) did and realized that she, too, is either a cylon or somehow related to them.  In finding Earth she found that the enemy she was staring at all this time was herself. 

   

  Another explanation for that and the rest of Galactica tearing each other apart or drowning in their morose after finding Earth?  All of us, like the humans and cylons in BSG, are chasing our own personal 13^th colony.  Think about what it is that keeps you going in life.  Whether it is money, power, stability, marriage, children, drugs, the next Harry Potter novel, good food, washboard abs or a promotion, we all journey for something but invariably find that once we attain that which we strove for that we are still unfulfilled.  Betrayed by mammon in providence’s clothing we are left wanting and hurting for more. 

   

  So what’s next for the crew of BSG and their new cylon comrades?  What does that mean for us, an originally homogenous human race that made itself heterogeneic due to pride and prejudice?  Human + cylon or cylon + cylon, it turns out that love was the answer to create life and perhaps is also the answer to the question of what it really means to be human, for love is the common denominator in us all, and only unconditional love can fulfill for all eternity.  And that unconditional love is available for everyone, no matter where you came from or how someone else defines you…black or white, male or female, Arab or Jew, gay or straight, human or cylon.

   

  All you have to do is ask.

   

  Have a great week!

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  That AFC championship game was BOOOOORING.  As a result, I'll be rooting for the Cardinals in the Super Bowl!

  • 11:24 am
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