timeimmortal

BeliefNet has an interview with Ron Moore, the mastermind behind the new iteration of Battlestar Galactica that I have been watching with avid interest. The topic of discussion is the Theology of the show, which is both a timely topic (given the intensifying religious debate that is shaping up as the show continues through its fourth, and last, broadcast season) and also a necessary discussion.

I’ve been trying to ferret out, for months, exactly where Moore is attempting to take the religion in the show, but one consistent thought I’ve had in all that time is that I really do want to applaud how he has handled the issue in its entirety. Outside of Babylon 5, very few science fiction series have ever really handled the issue of religion in any serious fashion (Deep Space Nine, which Moore also worked on, is the one exception I can think of), and indeed too much of science fiction seems predicated on the assumption that religion will go the way of the dodo by the time humanity well and truly takes to the stars.

I guess that’s why it’s called “fiction,” but still.

Some viewers say the show stereotypes fundamentalist Christians as kind of robotic, while others are saying, “This is great…pagans are finally the good guys!”

The parallels between the Cylon beliefs and fundamentalist Christian beliefs, yeah, there are certain aspects of it there, but there’s also the roots of the drama, also contains things such as Al Qaeda’s use of its religious practice to justify what it does. That’s part of who the Cylons are too, they aren’t just really stalking horses for fundamentalist Christianity.

There also seem to be elements of Eastern religions in the show with Leoben Conoy, another Cylon, talking about consciousness and reincarnation. Does each of the different models of Cylons represent a different religious point of view?

I think that’s true. Part of the idea of Leobon was to separate it from easy stereotypes of Christian beliefs. There wasn’t really a hierarchical church, there wasn’t an easy notion of Heaven and Hell. Leoben was starting to talk about things that were more Buddhist — consciousness, Enlightenment and reincarnation. I thought it was interesting to marry those notions to the idea of one deity.

As to Moore’s own religious views:

Do your own religious views shape the story lines?

I’m an Irish Catholic, not practicing. It probably just reflects my interest in my movement from Catholicism to atheism to agnosticism to interest in Eastern religions. I think the show is a reflection of my acknowledgement that faith and Religion are a part of the human experience, even if I’m not quite clear on exactly what it all means and what I truly believe. The most direct reflection of me in the show is this idea that when the Cylons became self-aware, when they became sentient, when they became people, they began to ask themselves the existential questions: “Why am I here? What is this all about? Is this all that I am? Is there something more?”

My view is that that’s fundamental to a thinking person. And that inevitably leads you to questions of faith and religion and “what will happen to me when I die?”

…

There’s been a lot of chatter on the message boards about the spiritual character of the show, with many people saying they enjoy it.

It’s fun to do a science-fiction series that isn’t just dealing with secular matters. I’m really glad people are responding to it.

I might not agree with Ron Moore’s personal religious convictions, but I applaud him heartily for putting things in this way. The show sets up very nicely many religious discussions, and even in the last couple of episodes there is a great example that one could draw upon.

In looking at Gaius Baltar’s newfound zeal for preaching monotheism amongst the Colonial population, one can draw certain parallels between that monotheism and Christianity. And yet, at the core of the monotheistic sentiments is a doctrine which is actually a logical inversion of Christianity. For whereas Baltar teaches that…

God only loves that which is perfect and he loves you. He loves you because you are perfect. You are perfect. Just as you are.

…Christianity teaches that God loves us in spite of our imperfections, that God — through Jesus — perfects that which he loves.

Things like this motivate a lot of thought, I find, and I think that’s something to be applauded in a television show, especially a science fiction show. Religion is an inescapable part of the human condition, and always has been; it is folly to think, like Gene Roddenberry did, that religion will disappear in due time. It won’t, and more importantly will continue to serve as an impetus for human action and reason for all ages yet to come.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

This is a damn hopeful sign:

Peshawar, Pakistan - Fed up with violence and broken promises, voters in Pakistan’s conservative northwest have thrown out the Islamist parties that ruled the province for five years - a sign that Pakistanis rejected religious extremism in a region where al-Qaeda and the Taliban have sought refuge.

Instead, voters in North West Frontier Province, which borders Afghanistan, gave their support in Monday’s national election to secular parties that promised to pave the streets, create jobs and bring peace to the turbulent province through dialogue and economic incentives to the extremists.

“They didn’t do anything for the people,” Bokhari Shah, 65, said of the religious parties. “They have done nothing to help the people, and we are afraid to even come out from our homes because of all these bomb blasts.”

…

Vast areas of the northwest were transformed into a war zone, where more than 80,000 Pakistani soldiers sought to crush a burgeoning Islamic insurgency. U.S. officials say al-Qaida has regrouped in the lawless area and extended its reach into the rest of the province and beyond.

Much of the trouble occurred in the autonomous tribal areas, which are administered from Islamabad rather than by the provincial government.

But the religious parties headquartered elsewhere in the northwest wield considerable influence in the tribal region, in part through funding religious schools linked to extremist groups.

Powerless to stop the militants, local police stood by as tribal leaders opposed to the Taliban were assassinated and owners of video and music stores received threats to close their businesses or face death.

“They made false promises. They said they would give us education, food and jobs, but they didn’t give us anything. They were all lies,” said retired soldier Mohammed Akram Shah. “I am from a village of more than 30 homes and we don’t have any electricity even after five years.”

On election day, voters showed they had had enough.

Pakistan was shaping up to be a major flashpoint in the global war against terrorism. Weakened by assassinations and the mistakes of its rulers, it became a place where Islamist parties and jihadists had almost free reign, where bombings, honour killings, and Taliban-strict sharia were becoming the norm. It looked very much like Pakistan might well and truly be headed for the dubious and dangerous distinction of being the first truly nuclear-armed Islamist state, especially in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

And to be fair, Pakistan is not out of the woods yet. The Islamists will not take kindly to this defeat, and there will likely be many more acts of terrible violence perpetrated against the people and politicians of northern Pakistan. But it is still a step — a major step — in the right direction, and deserves nothing less than the full and enthusiastic support of Western nations and the people thereof.

And on this, the second most solemn day of the year for Catholics, his thoughts are drawn to the two women recently used as carriers for reomtely-detonated bombs by al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq.

Down’s people can be extremely suggestible. They are like children, in many respects, and especially, trusting like small children, even as adults. As the father of a Down’s child myself, I can tell you just how innocent they are, and how loving. God made them without guile, and utterly in need of our protection. And in return for that demand upon our decency (Down’s children in Canada today are usually aborted), He made them a light in this world. O Lord.

Yet the truth is, that the use of the mentally disabled to carry explosives — and of children, too — is a standard Islamist practice in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and elsewhere. So in this respect, too, the bombings at al-Ghazil and New Baghdad were nothing new. An even stranger truth, is that the Al Qaeda terrorists are human, like us. Like their victims. Like the two Down’s ladies.

Today is an international day of mourning, and it is because we are fully human that we need to wear the ashes on our brow.

It is interesting, the contrast drawn. One one hand, we have the very visible and very open barbarity of Islamist men using these mentally handicapped women — as naive and as trusting as they likely were, in their almost childlike way — as unwitting instruments of mayhem, death, and destruction. On the other hand, we have the silent and undiscussable barbarity of “choice”, the death sentence of abortion that we in the supposedly enlightened West inflict upon those unborn children who are found to be with ‘defect.’

The Reader will know that I’m not one for moral equivalence or “we’re just like the terrorists” thinking, but in this way I think we are every bit as horrible as those men of al-Qaeda who orchestrated the plan that killed a hundred people, and maimed hundreds more, in two Iraqi marketplaces just recently. They, like far too many of us, saw the disabled not as persons, but as things to be used and/or disposed of — or both.

In the wake of the London bombings, the British police have done wonders to investigate the attacks, and have even made a few arrests in the process. Thus far, they have identified about 30 suspects with al-Qaeda links. A backlash is also underway, though not against Muslims, as was feared by some. It is instead a backlash against London mayor Ken Livingstone, for his continued support of the radical Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has publically endorsed terrorist bombers. He also publishes the occasional fatwa, which you can sometimes find on the IslamOnline website.

Mark Steyn has recently been on about dirty nukes, truly horrific weapons of mass destruction which, in addition to causing low-range kiloton-range damage against a target, spew increased volumes of very radioactive material over a wider raduis. These bombs are brutal weapons of mayhem with one purpose…limit the damage to structures, and instead kill the inhabitants with astronomical levels of radiation.

In particular, you can find the discussion in his Mailbox, and in specific as a response to one letter, cited below:

SECURITY RESTRAINED THEIR FIREPOWER
The inestimable Mr Steyn: “In other words, the scale of the carnage was constrained only by the murderers’ ambition and their manpower.”

I hesitate to disagree with someone whose thought I so respect, and whose command of language so far exceeds my own, but the carnage was also constrained by the murderers’ firepower, which has been downgraded from commercial airliners to backpacks as a result of stepped-up security. This is not an insignificant improvement.

Meyer Shields

MARK REPLIES: That’s correct in a sense. But what happens when it’s a dirty nuke in the backpack?

He’s also talked about portable nukes in one of his recent columns for the New York Sun. Again, the relevant passage is cited below:

Meanwhile, across the borders pour not primarily suicide bombers or suitcase nukes, though they will come in the end, but ideology — fierce, glamorous and implacable. That’s the final irony of the Israelification of Europe: distressing as it may be to Continental anti-Semites, in this scenario they’re the Jews.

At first, I was willing to put this down to Mr. Steyn’s usual talent for hyperbole and conjecture, but it appears that now it’s becoming something else. Say what you like about al-Qaeda, but they usually follow-through on the threats they make. One of the suspects in the London Bombings — Abu Musam al-Suri — recently was the subject of a Global Terror Alert, in which he asserts:

“I was honored to participate in the Afghani jihad against the Russians and the communists until we exterminated their forces and lowered their flanks and made an example out of them — as we will also do with America, with the help of Allah…I was honored to become acquainted with Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, and I worked with him during the days of the Afghani jihad in 1987. Then in 1988, I was honored by coming to know Shaykh Usama [bin Laden]…I was honored to become a member of Al-Qaida, and I worked with the group until 1992. During that time, I trained its first elite fighters and I was an instructor at its camps and other Arab-Afghan camps in various military and organizational methodologies, especially given my own high degree of specialized training in explosives production, special operations, and guerilla warfare that I received in Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. All praise be to Allah for his blessing.“

A short while later in the article, he is again quoted:

“I emphasize my complete denial of what was reported in the American media and uttered by American official that I had any connection to or prior knowledge of the glorious and heroic September 2001 attacks. I only heard about it through the media, and I — along with many millions of other Muslims — enjoyed watching the beginning of the collapse of America. May Allah reward those who carried out [the attacks] with the best of rewards [martyrdom].“

The thing is, we can probably take him at his word about his non-involvement…and this is the tie-in between this report and Mark Steyn’s invocation of the spectre of dirty nukes. In an internet posting back in December 2004, al-Suri asserted that:

“…if I had been consulted about [the September 11] operation, I would have advised them to select aircraft on international flights and to have put weapons of mass destruction aboard them… now that the American administration has revealed the evil and wickedness of its forces… it is not a far cry from justice to adopt the slogan, ‘Dirty Bombs for a Dirty Nation’… Let the American people—those who voted for killing, destruction, the looting of other nations’ wealth, megalomania, and the desire to control others—be contaminated with radiation!“

As I said before, you can say what you like about the jihadi, but they usually make good on threats. It seems clearer and clearer now that in my lifetime, I will hear news of a backpack nuke going off in a major urban centre somewhere, probably in America. But really, it could be anywhere, because this is the ‘war’ that al-Qaeda is fighting. They are not waging a war of protest, or fighting so that America or any other Western nation will give them land or other concessions. They are fighting to kill the indifel.

We are all of us infidels to them.

My thoughts and prayers go out this day to the victims of the terrorist attacks in London — I pray that God’s merciful salvation will see the many dead received into His arms, and that the Holy Spirit will guide and aid the healing of the wounded.

In the aftermath of these terrorist attacks, there will probably be a lot of commentary (again and again, flogging the dead horse again…) about the “root causes” of Terrorism, and I think that most of this commentary will eventually devolve into scathing condemnations of three things:

a) George Bush
b) The “Zionist” entity and Israel
c) the “quagmire” in Iraq

And none of it will even come close to the truth.

The root cause of terror, this terror, isn’t a desire to promote a political cause, nor is it a method of protest against oppression. Not in the case of al-Qaeda. Their “root cause” is much simpler than economic disenfranchisement or neo-Marxist “liberation”. They seek to kill the infidel…which would be us. Mark Steyn weighs in with a timely quote from a couple years back, when some French ships were the target of terror attacks. It appears the terrorists were hoping to take out an American ship, but the French boats worked too…they were all infidels. Here’s the relevant excerpt, for people too lazy to click on the link:

…

On which subject, the Independent’s Robert Fisk thinks the Aussies were targeted for a more specific reason—blowback for being too cosy with the Great Satan: “The French have already paid a price for their initial support for Mr Bush. The killing of 11 French submarine technicians in Karachi has been followed by the suicide attack on the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen. Now, it seems, it is the turn of Australia….” And don’t worry, there are plenty of others who’ll be getting theirs any day now. Just in case al-Qa’eda had missed one or two, Fisk helpfully provides a useful list of legitimate targets: “Belgium, which hosts Nato HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon…”. Blessings be upon you, Mister Robert, we had entirely forgot to add “Kill the Irish” to our “To Do” list.

I wonder if it was a cautious editor who added “initial” to that French “support for Mr Bush”. The French were supportive for about ten minutes after 11 September, but for most of the last year have been famously and publicly non-supportive: throughout the spring, their foreign minister, M. Vedrine, was deploring American “simplisme” on a daily basis. The French veto is still Saddam’s best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, “We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.”

No problem. They are all infidels.

…

(c) Copyright Mark Steyn, 2005, all rights reserved.

And even as I see that there are some people already weighing in with “root cause” commentary that pretty much follows the above predictions (see here, here, here, here, and here for starters…and then here for some laughable CIA paranoia), I’d just like to say that I hope the British government will show itself to be above such hypocrisy and address the real causes — the terrorists themselves, and the war they have declared against the infidel.

Because really, this “root cause” bleeding-heart talk is all pretty hypocritical, if you get right down to it.

Think about it…if al-Qaida or Hamas is justified in blowing up a bus in England or a restaurant in Tel Aviv because they perceive that the western Zionist oppressors are killing innocent Iraqis or Palestinians without cause and are driving the Islamic faith to ruin, then why isn’t some anti-abortion activist justified in blowing up an abortion clinic because s/he perceives that the pro-abortion oppressors are killing innocent unborn children without cause and are driving the moral fabric of society to ruin? Whether it’s a bus or an abortion clinic, it’s terrorism and it’s murder to blow it to pieces and kill people in doing so, so if you’re going to legitimize one and not the other then you’re committing a hypocrisy.

And if now you’re thinking “hah, now at least you’re admitting that Christians commit acts of terror too when they blow up clinics”, then I think you should read one of the recent articles at relapsedcatholic, and then the article that the author, Kathy Shaidle, links to from there. That’s not to say, of course, that there isn’t blood on the hands of some of those who claim to be Christian…but it IS to say that in many cases, the amount of blood is probably far less than many of my more liberal-minded acquaintances would prefer to see on the hands of members of a faith system they hate with almost irrational passion.

It’s both funny and tragic to me, and Mark Steyn has again commented on this (although sadly it appears that the relevant article is no longer linked from his page), that many of the same people who speak out against violence against women, oppression of women, violence against homosexuals, and discrimination against minority religions (i.e. “non-Christian” religions in the West), and who speak out in support of corruption-free elections and a vague concept of “freedom”, do so only in the West, in their own nations. On the global stage, many of these self-same people would be willing to plant themselves in the camp of fanatical theocrats and dictators who force women to wear burqas, who believe that the removal of the clitoris is the rite of passage into womanhood, who behead homosexuals — or toss them off rooftops, as the Taliban were fond of doing — and whose electoral process makes a mockery of concepts like democracy and “freedom”, all in the name of opposition to the even greater world threat: America. Saddam Hussein can execute and gas his own people, the Sudanese government can slaughter and rape Christians willy-nilly for the crime of not converting to Islam, and the “socially liberal” champions of individual rights here in the West are often the first to criticize America, Austrailia, and even Britain when they decide to go toe-to-toe against a dictator like that…or, come to think of it, when a Christian tries to peacefully convert them by handing them a pamphlet. If the Sudanese government stopped at pamphlets, there’d be a few thousand more Christian human beings alive today, and a few less trees. As sad as it is, for some people, the trees are the more important item.

And us conservatives are the scary ones, eh?

Well, so be it…consider yourself officially chilled to the bone.