disenchantedbunny.

Tec’ma’te, RAs.

I find it a strange coincidence that the less of a life that I have, the more of a nerd I become. Within half a year, I managed to watch every single season of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis and now own a few seasons of SG-1 on dvd (which, I might add, is impressive on a student budget). Originally, I hated the show. But my ex was into it, so I got the original movie to watch. I loved it.

The main premise of the Stargate franchise is exploring the universe using alien technology. The secondary premise of the Stargate Movie and SG-1 is killing off gods.

Of course, these gods are technically dead anyway. Chronos will never be thought to come back to create time again, and people will never again believe that Apophis will battle Ra to take the sun from the sky. But it would seem rather pointless to offend the religious majority. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to step on the toes of your audience. There are no real direct attacks on Christianity, or Islam, or Buddhism (excluding arguments made by idiots like this). It is the reasoning that the show uses to justify this killing that intrigues me.

For those unfamiliar with the show (and I do hope there are few of you), the original enemy are the Goa’uld, a parasitic race of beings who enslave the galaxy under the moniker of waring gods. The societies that they enslave are not polytheistic though; they all believe that their one, theistic god is the true god, and in most cases they will die for their belief. They are arrogant and temperamental, much like OT god. I am sure that most secular Christians would not care seeing those attributes removed from their proposed deity. But apart from disposing of the personified deities, early SG-1 is rather religion-friendly. The religion (or spirituality) that they follow is the rational, scientific process of ascension. So really, the show is attacking ‘faith-based’ religions, or non-verifiable, subjective religious experiences.

But it gets better, and worse. After the Goa’uld are adequately disposed of (there will always be a few OT-style deities being worshiped somewhere in the world, right?), a new enemy is introduced. The Ori are ascended beings who have been kind enough to show the world their ‘book of origin’. Their followers constantly quote their good book when their faith is attacked. They send off missionaries to convert or destroy. Many theists will argue that this does not resemble their beliefs, and, long-gone witch hunts and crusades aside, this is probably true. But the Ori are certainly fundamentalism incarnate.

But what most conservative theists probably don’t realise is that part of all this Origin bullshit is exactly what they believe. The Ori will destroy those for disbelief. We know the Ori are the bad guys because they are willing to punish those who can’t find enough evidence for belief in Origin. But isn’t this exactly the same as a deity who punishes those who fail to believe in him solely because they lack the evidence for that belief? Isn’t the notion of a perfectly benevolent deity incompatible with the notion of hell anyway? People must see some similarity here, as the show has been canceled and ratings have slightly fallen since the introduction of the new missionary-style baddies.

SG-1 points out a reason why I do not believe; what evidence is there for a perfectly benevolent deity? If hell awaits those who hold rationally acceptable beliefs, even if they’re wrong, then something is terribly wrong. Take an example from the history of science. Ptolemaic astronomy was way off the mark, and geocentricism seems ridiculous now. But people like Tycho Brahe were completely justified in their observations and measurements, even though their theories were off. The scientific community had observations that could be checked, repeated and verified, and just because their theories could not be expanded upon without observations made with powerful telescopes does not mean that they weren’t justified in believing what they did. Why does this analogy not get carried over in religious conversation? Why, when an atheist has no direct or inferred experience of a god (or any good metaphysical proof for his existence), do many theists still insist that their caring god will punish them for being reasonable? Even if there is a god, I doubt that he would punish us for being reasonable. This is even assuming that the notion of hell is even logically compatible with a benevolent god.

Save SG-1!

Lek tol,

James