Originally geeked at Liberal Street Fighter
Brother Cavil:
Do you know how useless prayer is?
Chanting and singing and mucking about with old, half-remembered lines of bad poetry.
And do you know what it gets you? Exactly nothing.
Battlestar Galactica made its return last Friday to Sci-Fi Channel. To repeat the obvious (to anybody who’s watched it and has any taste), it’s one of the most fully realized, well-written and relevant television shows being made right now. Many have commented on the way it has taken current events … suicide bombings, occupation, torture … and turned them on their head for viewers. It is through stories that people learn to see the world through another’s eyes, however imperfectly, and it is to the good that Americans watching this show are being confronted with facing why people would blow themselves up to resist a brutal occupation. As Heather Havrilesky put it in her rave review in Salon:
Overpowered and oppressed, how will the colonists possibly survive in the face of such brutal tactics? By committing terrorist acts, of course. The insurgents, from Starbuck’s husband Samuel Anders to Col. Tigh to Chief Tyrol, are in agreement: Only by sending men on suicide missions and planting bombs will the colonists stand a chance against their Cylon persecutors. That’s right — Cylons put their faith in one, all-powerful God and hope to “save” humankind by spreading God’s word through their ranks, while the humans place their faith not in God, but in terrorism. You really have to hand it to the writers of “Battlestar” for turning the current political climate on its head.
That is one of the best things about this show, and what makes it powerful is that it is merely telling a HUMAN story. There is no real sense that one particular point-of-view is being pushed: boths sides are flawed, both sides commit evil, terrible acts, both the humans and the cylons are beset by internal division over the proper course of action. Oh, no real particular point of view but one: the two most bloodthirsty characters on the show, Colonel Saul Tigh with the human resistance and Brother Cavil with the cylons, are both outspoken atheists.
It is a given in this culture that atheists are lacking any foundation (foundations only being real if they’re provided by some outside source) for moral decisions, so they would of course have none and can’t be trusted. BG did start out with a genocide carried out by monotheistic machines striking back at their human creators, but despite an early emphasis on the religious roots of their crime, far more emphasis was placed upon the idea that it was simple revenge for earlier discrimination. More recently, the two cylons most likely to argue to preserve humanity are the two most vocally religious, Number 6/Gina and Sharon/Boomer.
Tigh celebrates civilian casualties from insurgent bombings as necessary, and reacts angrily when the other resistance leaders questioned his plan to bomb the marketplace. Cavil is dismissive of concerns about innocents, convinced that the most important problem the cylons face is to reduce the human population to a managable, more docile number. Both of them mock the religious among their number as weak, as unwilling to make the hard, necessary choices. The atheist within me who was dragged into a dark church basement by a minister at age seven and berated for being a “sinner” gets a little thrill when these two take shots at God, or the colonial Gods, and the weakness of His/Their worshippers, but the way they turn their contempt into destruction fills me with dread.
The religious characters are both good and bad, brutal and forgiving. So far, though, these two are the only real face of atheism/disbelief that we’re presented with. There were some brief implications in early episodes that then Captain Adama has little use for the colonials’ scriptures, but his viewpoint on these issues has been fairly muffled, other than his cynical use of the mythical Earth as a goal to motivate humankind to fight to survive.
As Ronald Moore has done an admirable job of presenting a balanced universe without getting preachy or forced, I’m hopeful that we’ll see some developments in Admiral Adama that will balance out the butchers Cavil and Tigh. One of the most striking developments this season is the growing trust and friendship between the Captain and Caprica Sharon. His willingness to talk, to find common ground, to actually build a trusting relationship with the woman who shot him (and yes, I know that she’s a different avatar of the same model, but still, could YOU do it?), is a sign that hope and cooperation can be built through human relationships, without falling back on religious cant. Perhaps the Captain will become the the disbelieving diplomat who presents a humanist’s balance to the nihilism of Tigh and Cavil. I know I can’t wait to see.
“Can I ask you a question? How do you know you can trust me?” – Sharon
“I don’t. That’s what trust is.” – Admiral Adama
