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Religion in Battlestar Galactica
So, having watched Battlestar Galactica through episode 2.9 ("Flight of the Phoenix")--and please, no one spoil me beyond that in the comments!--I've been thinking a little bit about religion in the series. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bop_radar, for your sake, there are no spoilers behind the cut past 2.6 ("Home, part 1")--that's where you're at right now, right?
EDITED TO ADD: There are now spoilers in the comments through 2.9, so beware if you're avoiding spoilers for season 2.
I know the original BSG was supposedly inspired by Mormon theology, but I was way too young to get that at the time, and I doubt I would have recognized it, anyway. (For those wondering--I think this can be seen mainly in the whole "wagon train in space" idea--both recapitulating the journey of the LDS from Nauvoo to Deseret after Smith's assassination *and* the migration of the lost tribe of Israel to the Americas. There was also an episode I vaguely recall--I think I was 8 or 9 when the show aired--where Apollo and Starbuck encounter some angelic being who tells them something like "What you are now, we once were. What we are, you may some day become.")
Clearly that's not what is driving the religious underpinnings of *this* version of BSG, except perhaps in the idea of Earth as a lost holy land. I'm almost tempted to buy the original series to see if the original colonists were also polytheists or not--I absolutely can't remember. But I'm really struck by the way that the "good guys" in this series are the polytheists, because that is really playing against the evolutionary model of religion that has dominated anthropology of religion since the late nineteenth century. Basically, since the time of Edward Tylor, at least, it has been assumed that in all societies religion follows a "natural" progression from animism to polytheism to monotheism (to Christianity, most 19th century theorists would have added). Biblical scholars, for example, trace the origin of "true" monotheism in Judaism to around the time of Ezra, after the Babylonian exile. Prior to that, the Israelites weren't monotheists in the modern sense, they were actually kathenotheists: that is, they believed that there were many gods, they simply had covenanted to worship only YHWH. ("You shall have no other gods before me " does not, actually, deny the existence of other gods.) Later, however, those other gods were dismissed as "false idols"--just as the Cylons dismiss the colonial pantheon (which seems to be the Greco-Roman pantheon) as false idols.
Making the Cylons the monotheists, then, is a kind of ironic commentary on the evolutionary theory of religion. The Cylons themselves would buy into the theory that their religion--just like them--was actually the apex of evolution, but of course the humans would disagree. It's actually hard to tell, from the show itself, if we're supposed to privilege one religion after another. After all, every time so far that a cylon has made a religious prediction (Six about the baby being born in that cell; that Cylon played by Callum Keith Rennie (Leoben, or something like that) predicting that Starbuck would play a key role in the quest to find earth--and there are probably some others I'm forgetting)it has come true. On the other hand, anytime anyone has prayed (ok, anytime Starbuck has prayed) her prayers seem to have been answered, and many of the prophecies in the Colonial scriptures do seem to be coming true via Laura Roslin.
I am intrigued by some of the things Home part II seemed to reveal, religiously speaking, but I'll save that untilbop_radar has seen that episode to comment on it--I think I want to watch it again first anyway.
bop_radar, for your sake, there are no spoilers behind the cut past 2.6 ("Home, part 1")--that's where you're at right now, right?EDITED TO ADD: There are now spoilers in the comments through 2.9, so beware if you're avoiding spoilers for season 2.
I know the original BSG was supposedly inspired by Mormon theology, but I was way too young to get that at the time, and I doubt I would have recognized it, anyway. (For those wondering--I think this can be seen mainly in the whole "wagon train in space" idea--both recapitulating the journey of the LDS from Nauvoo to Deseret after Smith's assassination *and* the migration of the lost tribe of Israel to the Americas. There was also an episode I vaguely recall--I think I was 8 or 9 when the show aired--where Apollo and Starbuck encounter some angelic being who tells them something like "What you are now, we once were. What we are, you may some day become.")
Clearly that's not what is driving the religious underpinnings of *this* version of BSG, except perhaps in the idea of Earth as a lost holy land. I'm almost tempted to buy the original series to see if the original colonists were also polytheists or not--I absolutely can't remember. But I'm really struck by the way that the "good guys" in this series are the polytheists, because that is really playing against the evolutionary model of religion that has dominated anthropology of religion since the late nineteenth century. Basically, since the time of Edward Tylor, at least, it has been assumed that in all societies religion follows a "natural" progression from animism to polytheism to monotheism (to Christianity, most 19th century theorists would have added). Biblical scholars, for example, trace the origin of "true" monotheism in Judaism to around the time of Ezra, after the Babylonian exile. Prior to that, the Israelites weren't monotheists in the modern sense, they were actually kathenotheists: that is, they believed that there were many gods, they simply had covenanted to worship only YHWH. ("You shall have no other gods before me " does not, actually, deny the existence of other gods.) Later, however, those other gods were dismissed as "false idols"--just as the Cylons dismiss the colonial pantheon (which seems to be the Greco-Roman pantheon) as false idols.
Making the Cylons the monotheists, then, is a kind of ironic commentary on the evolutionary theory of religion. The Cylons themselves would buy into the theory that their religion--just like them--was actually the apex of evolution, but of course the humans would disagree. It's actually hard to tell, from the show itself, if we're supposed to privilege one religion after another. After all, every time so far that a cylon has made a religious prediction (Six about the baby being born in that cell; that Cylon played by Callum Keith Rennie (Leoben, or something like that) predicting that Starbuck would play a key role in the quest to find earth--and there are probably some others I'm forgetting)it has come true. On the other hand, anytime anyone has prayed (ok, anytime Starbuck has prayed) her prayers seem to have been answered, and many of the prophecies in the Colonial scriptures do seem to be coming true via Laura Roslin.
I am intrigued by some of the things Home part II seemed to reveal, religiously speaking, but I'll save that until
bop_radar has seen that episode to comment on it--I think I want to watch it again first anyway.