Saturday, February 17, 2007

Asteroids and Religion

It must be nice not to have to worry about the peripheral world when writing for a science fiction series. There's this episode of Stargate SG-1 where a very large asteroid is plunging toward the earth, courtesy of a few bad aliens. Less than a minute before it hits, the heroes manage to dump the asteroid into hyperspace for just a moment, so that it emerges on the other side of the planet, about a minute away, traveling back into space. Whew. Crisis averted.

What I want to know is, if they refuse to tell the general populace about the existence of the aliens and the stargate, how do they deal with the fact that everyone with a religion is going to assume god just reached down and spared earth from the asteroid by using his divine will to momentarily whisk away the big, bad rock. You know a certain segment of the population would be absolutely insufferable, to the point of refusing to believe science had been involved when the government eventually fessed up. I want to see that as the central theme of an episode.

3 comments:

BiggTree said...

Do you hate God, or just the people that love Him?

Scooter said...

Neither. But I'm not particuarly fond of assumptions of divine intervention. And I don't attribute the behavior to Christians alone, but to anyone who makes that immediate leap to divine intervention on behalf of any deity. Wanting something to be divine intervention obviously doesn't make it so. Haggard for instance. Some people would really like to believe God stepped in and "fixed" him over the last several weeks. Their belief doesn't make it so. There are other explanations that are considerably more likely. Like he's not "cured" or he's brainwashed himself to believe he's cured.

BiggTree said...

Don't be so kwik to dismiss miracles. If and when your SG-1 scenario plays out, the divine intervention lies in the fact that the world killer asteroid didn't come untill we had the tech to deal with it.