It’s been a great discussion, but methinks it’s time to move on.

Vic

I should have made a general reply to all the atheists who found the introduction of God ‘intellectually offensive’ or otherwise disturbing and incongruent with the theme of the show.

I’ve read a good many posts with derisive comments like “God did it”, from people that clearly have an emotional investment in attacking religion.

What grates on me is how truly intolerant the supposedly enlightened really are – my favorite current example is the Global Warming TrueBelievers. Anyone that doesn’t fall in line is akin to a Nazi. The Obamaists are another example.

I have a problem with homosexuality – many who support that lifestyle would call my homophobic (incorrectly). I’ve never watched a complete episode of ‘Will & Grace’ cause it makes me uncomfortable. Yet I’ve never felt the need to confront anyone over their sexuality – in person or on a forum. I certainly could have done without Gaeta’s ‘coming out’, but it didn’t ruin the BSG experience for me.

Oh, and actually, I do twitter, though it’s not my preferred medium, to be sure.

I’m guessing from your verbose replies that you aren’t a fan of twitter.

“I *personally* found the religious aspects [of the show] to be intellectually offensive *BUT*, this is a relatively minor part of why I disliked the ending.”

I fully qualified my statement to indicate it was in the context of the show. I’m sorry you missed that, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it was an honest mistake because, thus far, I’ve not seen any evidence that you have attempted to deliberately misinterpret my comments.

I’m not going to get into a deep religious discussion here because my comments will just be deleted. However, since you made the statement you did, I will respond, this once, to that part of your post:

Let me start by saying that I absolutely DO NOT believe that intellect and belief in god are mutually exclusive; I have known very smart and very dumb people from both sides of the argument. Although I did not initially say this, I will further qualify my comment by saying that I believe it is entirely possible for intellectual people to believe but I do not accept that belief is, in and of itself, an intellectual exercise. I don’t say this to ridicule but simply because, and I think you would have to agree, belief is defined as acceptance of a claim IN THE ABSENCE OF SUPPORTING FACTS.

In order to be considered a fact, a claim must meet certain standards, the least of which is hard, fast, verifiable evidence to back it up. If a source makes a claim, then at a bare minimum, another independent source must verify that claim with hard, fast evidence.

Believers consider god (or gods) an absolute, but there are 10,000+ religions in this world and only a handful believe in the same god you do. Excluding the differences even within christianity about what is the “right” thing to believe, the only source material is the bible, which is absolutely chock full of contradictions, thereby excluding the possibility of determining the factuality of the claims.

A purely intellectual approach, such as that offered by science, starts with the presumption that a claim is INVALID. A hypothesis is formed, based on currently known facts (that have already been demonstrated to meet the stringent requirements I already detailed), a series of tests is formed to determine the validity of that hypothesis. If the hypothesis is shown to be incorrect, it is discarded and a new hypothesis formed based on the newly available facts (negatives can be at least as useful as positives).

The point is that a purely intellectual approach EXCLUDES simple belief, starts with the known facts and sees where they lead. A belief-based approach, by definition, starts with a conclusion and ignores anything that would discount that conclusion.

That belief-based systems were ONCE an intellectual pursuit I can fully accept. Man is driven to explain the world around him. Without scientific tools and only a rudimentary understanding of the world around him, various cultures have believed in magic, single gods, multiple gods, nature spirits and so on, all in an attempt to understand the world and its mysterious processes. A later model suggested that all things could be explained through various ratios of earth, wind, air and water. Later still, we discovered the atom, then we discovered quantum mechanics and we’re on the verge of going deeper still. What I’m saying is that religion is Science 1.0. It was an idea, an attempt to explain the world, but we’ve moved on and we have better models to describe our universe and those models are verifiable, are quantifiable, are reproducible and observable. No, we can’t answer every question, but there will always be more questions; that is the nature of what we are. No one believes that people are made up of various parts of wind, earth, air and fire… it was a perfectly reasonable (for the time) attempt to explain the world, but we now know better and discarding those old ideas when they can’t be validated is the natural evolution of our intellectual interrogation of the universe.

Hopefully, you see the distinction between the two claims, even though I hadn’t actually made either in my original comment, where I was simply trying to point out that the ending failed to satisfy because the religious nature of the ending made the intellectual exercise of trying to fathom where the show was heading a pointless exercise, entirely derailed by an external element that changed the entire premise. Put another way, I was referring to the ENDING, not to religion itself.

“… come back and we’ll talk some more”

The rest of your message adds nothing to the conversation; it’s simply a rehash of your attempts to twist my words to fit you misinterpretation of my comments. This makes your reply irrelevant and boring and not any more of a reply than this. When you go back and read what I wrote and stop trying to twist it around, come back a

Well said and I challenge anyone else out there to address the show without going down the religion path.

It’s easily doable… I’ve done it for 6 years.

EVERYONE NEEDS TO REMEMBER SOMETHING:

This is the beauty of entertainment, art or what have you.

It’s a massive Rorschach inkblot test.

We see what we either relate to or hate or find appealing or what have you. It’s our escape in whatever form we look to it as.

Some of us wanted answers.
Some of us like the open ended finale.
That’s the awesome power of individual perspectives. The different ways we see things.

When I came away from the finale, I had a specific perspective (ONE THAT I NEVER ACTUALLY MENTIONED) but as I read what everyone has to say, though it may have differed from my take, I think, “Hey, that’s pretty interesting. I like where this person is coming from”

I’ve gotten new ideas from the different perspectives. It makes me think, rather than dig in and try to defend my perspective. I like my perspectives being challenged. It opens up my world to so much more.

Sheesh, I hate ranting. But I am done.

Peace out and be nice everyone. Remember, we all have different colored lenses.

You may have found it “intellectually offensive” but intellect and belief in God are not mutually exclusive, however much you continue to insist that they are.

To me it’s ridiculous to NOT believe in God.

Vic

First – Earth. Concluding the show with ‘another’ Earth would have been cheap. The whole show is wrapped around them being ‘us’ – not aliens with similar failings/struggles, but humans, tied into our own mythologies.

As for the ‘harbinger of death’, that phrase was uttered by a Cylon, and Kara was a harbinger of death – for the Cylons. This isn’t that difficult.

As for fan reaction, as in all things, the whiners/complainers are over-represented. Go look at the POLLS (like I said). They’re no where near 50/50. You are in the distinct minority.

Go back and watch the first two seasons – there is no shortage of religious references.

I would imagine most watchers of the show can find more than a few questions they would like answered, and can point out a plot twist or development they would change – but your complaints go above and beyond that. Face it – your problem with the series is all wrapped around YOUR problem (read: intolerance) with religion.

For me, that was somewhat of a let-down as it, again, seemed to go against the grain of what had been defined before.

* This may have been touched on in the novels but they are non-canon, so I’m going purely by what was in the movies.

No, we were not told they were coming to THIS Earth; they found Earth… it was a nuclear wasteland. THIS Earth is not the original Earth.

The Journey wasn’t guided by the Pythia prophecies – the story diverged from those prophecies long ago and in the end, it was not a dying leader who led humanity to ‘Earth’, but an angel (in the literal sense) who was also called the ‘harbinger of death’, another bit of throw-away drama that never led anywhere. as it was always implied that ‘harbinger of death’ was in reference to humanity, not the Cylons.

Yes, I found the religious aspects to be intellectually offensive. They were sufficiently suppressed in the first 2 seasons (primarily Caprica-6) and at least part of the third that I could overlook them. Put another way, the story itself was compelling enough that I wanted to see where it went, regardless.

… and here’s where I restate, yet again, that it is less the religious nature of things that annoyed me about the ending and more that the story that had been built up over the four seasons was essentially rendered meaningless.

Oh, and I don’t know where you’re looking on the sci-fi BSG forum; I’ve spent a good bit of time on there and the bulk of messages are completely unrelated to BSG and those that are, are split roughly 50/50. I based my comment on the fact that if you google, “BSG finale” and browse around the sites such as this one, the result is overwhelmingly negative, for the reasons that have already been brought up on this forum by me and others.

What I don’t get is what show have you been watching for the past six years?!?!

You were told they were coming to Earth – THIS Earth.
The whole journey was guided by the Pythia/Dying Leader prophecies.
Kara’s childhood vision of the ‘eye’ were dead-on, she was alternately claimed to be an Angel and the ‘harbinger of death’. Ultimately, you saw Kara’s Viper explode, then she resurrected in a pristine Viper.

And after six years of watching this, you claim to have found the religious aspects of the show “intellectually offensive”?

You know what I find so stupid as to offend my intellect, shows like Dr. Phil, Oprah and Jerry Springer – and you know what I do, I DON’T WATCH THEM.

I can do that to a point, but things that happen in a work of fiction have to make sense within that universe in order to maintain a suspension of disbelief.

Now they’d been hinting at the whole God aspect for a long time on the show, but it was always kind of “out there.” To have something miraculous happen in order to wrap things up on a show so embedded in the plausible science side of sci-fi did seem like a cop-out.

Vic

People have seized on the fact that I’m an atheist as the reason I didn’t like the ending. Absolutely not… and hopefully my last reply makes clear my reasoning.

Star Trek, as much as I love it, had a nasty habit of creating an impossible scenario from which there’s no escape… and then at the bleakest moment someone shouts out, “Stream chronitons through the deflector array and create an inverse wave-pulse at a frequency of 3.2GHz”… and the problem magically goes away.

I hate that kind of ending! it’s a cop-out. The viewer with a vested interest in the plot development loves to journey with the characters and try to work out a solution with them. When the solution is as impossible to fathom as this, it cheapens the story, and frankly, bringing as powerful a character as a god into the thing means there’s no way they could ever have failed to win.

Believe it or not, I would have preferred more concrete answers myself.

Vic