io9 
Enter your username and password.
San Francisco, 10:46 AM
Sun Nov 8
10 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip your editors: tips@io9.com
Editor-in-Chief:
Annalee Newitz | Email
News Editor:
Charlie Jane Anders | Email
Associate Editor:
Meredith Woerner | Email
Assistant Editor:
Lauren Davis | Email
Weekend Editor:
Graeme McMillan | Email
Contributors:
Joshua Glenn
Stephen Goldmeier | Email
Ed Grabianowski | Email
Austin Grossman
Paul Hogan | Email
Lauren Davis | Email
Chris Hsiang | Email
Lynn Peril | Email
Ann VanderMeer
Alasdair Wilkins | Email
Graphic Designer:
Stephanie Fox | Email
Interns:
Tim Barribeau | Email
Julia Carusillo | Email
Alex Eichler | Email
Cyriaque Lamar | Email
Caitlin Petrakovitz | Email
Mary Ratliff | Email
Josh Snyder | Email
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
10/08/09
10/01/09
What does get old for me, however, is that sci-fi shows seem to think that the only way for their characters to search for spiritual meaning is through the lens of the God of the Levant. There are so many vastly more interesting ways to approach the subject that I can’t help but roll my eyes in frustration when the only book that the characters turn to, out of the thousands and thousands of possible spiritual tracts available to reference, is the Bible.
10/04/09
My guess is twofold. 1) Most of the writers come from that background, whether or not they actually believe in it themselves. 2) It's very, very hard to come up with an alternate religion. Herbert came close, but he essentially made a (historically plausible) mashup of the existing religions.
10/01/09
Hollywood isn't about originality, they're about formula. Everyone's just trying to copy the BSG formula.
"So consider this a plea for more thoughtful portrayals of religion in science fiction — and fewer random, thoughtless, kitchen-sink inclusions."
That would be nice; don't hold your breath.
-Kle.
10/01/09
10/02/09
-Kle.
09/30/09
The thing that always bugged me about BSG is that the civilization was unabashedly parallel to our own, right down to the hummers, business suits, and other artifacts of late 20th/early 21st century American society. While Star Trek also took this tact with all the Earth-parallel worlds, Roddenberry also made it a point to demonstrate the progress that had been made by the 23rd century (except for mini-skirts of course, although he over-compensated for it in Next Gen).
In fact, this so-called realism was not realistic at all in socio-historical sense. In this case, the reliance on Christian religious context is just another part of thebanalization and Americanization of television Science Fiction.
However, Chronicles of Reddick was a nice change up with the Liberal Muslim Democracy of New Mecca being conquered by the undead underverse seeking Necromongers.
10/01/09
09/30/09
Also, I often hear people ranting about this element of religion or that infused in their favorite weekly show and I honestly don't understand what the big fuss is. Sure sometimes it seems heavy-handed, but like it or not, even if you don't believe in an all-powerful God, Western Society sprouted from and was formed by many religious ideas, actions, wars, imagery, and beliefs. The idea that somehow we can completely excise it from our culture is impractical, unrealistic, and ridiculous. It's not just our ideas about religion itself, but it's also effected for good and/or ill language, codes of conduct, mores...
Also I feel the urge to place these ideas into works of fiction is in many ways quite human. Simply because of the fact that in reality we do not know everything. Go ahead and eliminate religion from all science fiction, but ironically what you're left with is a mere fraction of the complete human experience. I hear the term "speculative" fiction used so often for science fiction. Why is there a need to limit speculative within a pre-definite confine? Isn't that a bit of an oxymoron? Speculate...but stop here. Don't use your imagination. Don't think about what it could all mean. It MUST be within this range. Fine. Except good fiction is the complete opposite of that. It's about exploring ideas. What if's.
Imagine Greater.
haha...sorry I couldn't help it.
09/30/09
An article about religion that has generated 140+ comments that are thoughtful and just as interesting to read as the article itself.
Wow.
09/30/09
09/30/09
Also...
@it must be bunnies: YOU TAKE THAT BACK! My (worldview and/or belief system) is obviously much better than your (worldview and/or belief system), therefore I must call you a (troll/crazy person/ninny) to prove this fact to my insecure self! So THERE!
:P
09/30/09
I haven't seen Flash Forward, but it sounds perfectly plausible to me that some babysitter who was making out with a guy when she suddenly had an actual vision of the future might decide that God did it to punish her. I mean, she was horsing around when an actual miracle happened! Under circumstances like that, a lot of people would find religion in a hurry. I'm not saying it's logical, but it sounds like a predictable response.
10/01/09
09/30/09
09/30/09
He's also penned episodes of Doctor Who with heavy religious elements, like Gridlock or the series three finale, which contained what fans mockingly refer to as "Jesus Doc".
Science Fiction must relate to religion as Science Fiction must relate to the society that produced it and ours is, simply put, a religious society. Religious Themes won't be on their way out until religion is.
09/30/09
I find him fascinating as one of the sort of "cultured atheists" - people who are atheist apparently because they think they're too smart to be tacky and religious - who reverts to simply building his own religious figure.
09/30/09
It's like Voltaire said. If God does not exist, it becomes neccesary to create him. Davies creates his God in his fiction, but I don't think it's bcause he views religion as too tacky or stupid. I think he simply has this religious impulse independent of whether or not he's actually religiously inclined.
10/01/09
Actually, the phrase I've read most often is "Tinkerbell Jesus."
09/30/09
Whether or not that's true, who knows? But what I did like was the fact Scott doesn't say a damn thing about what he saw on world. That was a nice way of flagging up the fact he's a rookie and not used to this level of weird.
09/30/09
(And I think Dr. Lizardo is onto something when he points out that religion is all over the political landscape these days. It's pretty much impossible to deal with current affairs, even metaphorically, without touching on the culture war.)
09/30/09
It took the RC Church a few hundred years to forgive Galileo and they make a snap decision about the aliens in V? I call bullshit
09/30/09
Orwell had a few interesting things to say about this:
[digitalseance.wordpress.com]
09/30/09
09/30/09
The possibility of extraterrestrial life is ALREADY something the Catholic Church is thinking about [www.catholic.net] Them welcoming the Visitors would be entirely in keeping with the Catholic ethos. Distinctions may come in after the fact, in how they react to the Visitors' actions.
09/30/09
(Personally, Marx is a hack hypocrite. It's easy to tell people to give up their stuff for the good of everyone when someone else is paying your bills.)
10/01/09
10/01/09
ref. [en.wikipedia.org]
09/30/09
I'm right there with you in hoping for more thoughtful portrayals of religion--in everything (most especially within religion itself)--not just SF. But I think for the most part this trend in speculative television is not aimed at SF geeks, and more about widening their audience.
09/30/09
[onlyagame.typepad.com]
09/30/09
09/30/09
09/30/09
09/30/09
Anyway, this is the all in the vein of the collective unconscious, buddhism, Campbell, etc...
I guess what I'm saying is that, for humans, the idea of space is synonymous with spirituality and the meaning of our existence - our place in the cosmos.
09/30/09
09/30/09
09/30/09
What goood is religion doing for us ?
NOTHING................but trouble for folks who want true freedom.
09/30/09
09/30/09
09/30/09
09/30/09
09/30/09
Seriously. They had to start out with single notes, and the dawning realization of what a chord was sent shock waves through religious music.
But, I guess we're all being absolutists here, so it can't be that the church has done some good and a lot of bad, so I'll have to put myself down as one of the religion = bad category.
Too bad we're not trying to be rational. I'd hate to just give a wholesale dismissal of something without advocating what good it has done.
09/30/09
":@Jesse Astle: You do know that the rise of the church in what is known as the dark ages led to a banning of all forms of music, and music had to be relearned from scratch in the later middle ages?"
Please cite source and context, that sounds fishy.
09/30/09
Actually, from what we can tell, people were healthier (and possibly, although there's really no way of knowing, happier) during the Dark Ages. This had nothing to do with religion, nor did the onset of the Dark Ages. At least, not directly. The dark ages resulted from the collapse of Rome and, more broadly, the international order that Rome represented. No order leads to the collapse of trade and various institutions, but also to reinvestment in local communities. We don't call it the Dark Age anymore because we now understand it as a time when europe actually thrived culturally and economically.
Arguably the Church helped us cope with the collapse of the Roman Empire by preserving greek and latin texts which formed the basis of the Renaissance but hey, let's blame the Church for all kinds of made up crap to make a point!
09/30/09
It does not matter, Muslims and/or Chrsitians are retarded assholes who don't want anything more than to be right and put people under the heel of rules that don't make any sense. You can go back and say the exact reverse about what you said. Persecution of the science's set us way back, what if they weren't under the constant pressure of being called heretics and then subsequently banished, totured, killed or worse. So !yay! we got the Sistine Chapel and all it cost us was hundreds of years of scientific discovery that could have taken us much farther than we are now. All for the sake of God and a bunch of arbitrary rules.
09/30/09
The Church never banned music outright. There were composers such as Léonin and Pérotin in the Middle Ages. And you've never heard of Gregorian Chanting?
09/30/09
That puts them above the average critics, who doesn't even have a real clue about anything including the Bible.
"In recent memory can you point to anything that religion has done to better society as a WHOLE!?"
The abolition of slavery in the British Empire was largely the result of pressure by Christian groups. In Canada, women's suffrage was most predominantly fought for by religious women (The Famous Five) and we got universal healthcare courtesy of a Baptist minister who went into politics. Indian independence credits Gandhi as it's father, who as a Hindu. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister. Malcom X was a Muslim.
On scientific discovery, the majority of early scientific luminaries were religious themselves and religion formed the philosophical basis of Western science. In a nutshell, the idea that the universe was consistent and rule-based under the authority of a Creator who imbued human beings with the elevated status of stewards laid the framework for humans as detached observers of a universe that could be reasonably observed. Then you have the proto-science of people like Hildegard von Bingen, the reintroduction of Greek though via the Scholastics and a particular type of Christian institution called the "university", and it becomes apparent that there would be no science if not for religion.
People really ought to know history before presuming to speak about it.
10/03/09
"@Jesse Astle: I don't hate religion but I do think it's followers have no real clue about anything other than the Bible. Yeah there was awesome art inspired by Christianity....the best of it was, what, 500 years ago. In recent memory can you point to anything that religion has done to better society as a WHOLE!?"
Off the top of my head, the nonviolent civil rights movement, the nonviolent protests by monks in Burma, even the nuclear disarmament movement...
"It does not matter, Muslims and/or Chrsitians are retarded assholes who don't want anything more than to be right and put people under the heel of rules that don't make any sense."
Ah, so throw it all out. That's fine, we can do without algebra - an invention of medieval Muslim scholars - or genetics - first developed by a Catholic priest.
" Persecution of the science's set us way back, what if they weren't under the constant pressure of being called heretics and then subsequently banished, totured, killed or worse."
Vastly over exaggerated. If you're talking about Galileo, his troubles stemmed in part from intolerant Church leaders but as well from his own lack of understanding of politics.
In any case, the idea that science would be greatly ahead of things without religion is an overused canard.