Now I don’t intend to take you back to the 1970’s Battlestar Galactica. Rather, let’s go back about 20ish years to the remake, which is available on a few streaming services, possibly with a fee to watch. I happen to think that it’s worth it.
Anyhoo, on Amazon, if you watch the series it begins with all of humanity in a fleet of mixed spacecraft fleeing the Cylons. When I watched the series back in the day, that wasn’t the starting point. The start was a miniseries that set up the entire series, and you can’t appreciate the series without seeing the miniseries as an introduction. It’s like reading the New Testament and having no context to work from. Yes, the miniseries must be watched first. I paid 12.99 to purchase the stream it and don’t regret it. Here’s a link on Amazon.
It begins in what looks like an idyllic setting. In this case, it is on the planet Caprica, but that is one of twelve colonies that constitute all of known humanity. For those in the know, there is a fair amount of cultish assumptions in the series. It is, after all, an Earth humanity origin story that seeks to rewrite the history of the Bible, utilizing horoscopes, Egyptian concepts, Mormonism, and other unchristian concepts to reduce the concept of God into myth. One concept trumps another, so to speak.
Caprica looks like the Pacific coast, minus the due penalty for error found all over what we know as the coast. There is no crime, no homelessness, no natural calamity. The people are all happy, trusting, and content. They are soft and the former Cylon war is something that comes up as a historical reference from 40 years prior. Kind of like 1985, where all seemed to be going great in America, just without the Korean or Vietnam war or the other endless entanglements. The military exists and has increased capabilities since then, but is mostly there in a memorial sense. So not like our 1985. Think of our 1985 as if we were living in John Lennon’s “Imagine” song, only without an inherent sin problem that resides in every human descended from Adam. Hey, they don’t call it science fiction without reason, right? In this Edenic world, people go about their business without fear, waste or want. During the Cylon war they had learned lessons regarding the dangers of AI and of networked computers.
Let me back up
The Cylons were robots built to serve humanity. They did various tasks that humans couldn’t, or wouldn’t do. To make them more capable, humans made them self-aware and able to communicate together on a grand scale, a hive mind. These Cylons became a fair percentage of the military as well and decided to revolt. Any human weapon that was exposed to a computer network was compromised, causing ships like the Battlestar Galactica to be purposefully built without connected computers.
Strong men create good times
Humans won the war and the Cylons left to find a new home, then fell out of contact for forty years, when they returned to cause a human genocide, revealing fairly quickly that they had devised ways for some of them to so closely resemble humans that they could mix into our society without being detected. One of these Cylons seduced the top scientific mind of humanity and used her relationship with him to rewrite some of the algorithms in human defenses. He benefited from her insight and gained notoriety. She benefited by opening the door so the human colonies could all be attacked and she also pursued a way to reproduce sexually, which could only be accomplished with a blend of sex and emotional love. Hey, it was the turn of the century and it was Sci-Fi so just go with it!
All this to say that the existence that a generation of humanity had enjoyed was pretty much everything one would want in a Christless Utopia. Yes, there still is disease and death. But the people would live in relative health, peace, prosperity, and more. Not everything can be revealed in a miniseries, but you get the idea that this clean, comfortable life was everything we ever wanted.
Good times create soft men
This Cylon “woman” seduced the smartest man in the colonies. He got that title, at least partially, through the help of his inhuman seductress. She is a Jezebel while he is an Ahab. She is manipulative and is a covetous murderer while he is a spineless man enjoying his success won by her schemes. His ineptitude allowed the murder of all the civilization and only a tiny fraction of survivors were able to flee.
Soft men create hard times
The survivors roam the Universe for the remainder of the series, always looking for a planet where they can lay down roots without being found by the Cylons. The Cylons are a hive mind and technically cannot die, but seeking out a way to eradicate them is also a goal, though a difficult one to accomplish. Most of the people in the convoy are just hoping to survive to the goal, but the Commander of the Military remembers the war. He insisted that there be no computer network. He runs his ship in an old-school fashion, much to the chagrin of the people he is protecting.
Hard times create strong men
I won’t spoil the entire series for you, but it is a microcosm of our own experience just as all good Sci-Fi is intended to provide a looking glass into our human experience. Humanity has gone through this cycle before and will continue to do so. Soft men creating hard times has led to such events as the American Civil War, World War II and whatever is just around the corner for us now. I do believe that COVID was just the revealing that we were not as strong as we thought. There was a shaking in our world and our folly is becoming evident to all as one only need accuse us of racism or transphobia and we scurry away with out tails between our legs.
Whatever is coming up, those who insist on Egalitarian Feminist ideas are not going to make it. How can one be either Egalitarian or Feminist if the definition of what a woman is cannot be defined? How can anyone be a misogynist for the same reason? There is a saying that the center cannot hold, but in our culture it isn’t that the center is incapable of holding. It’s that there is no center. We are living out the book of Judges.
There are some here who can remember the good times, though. The world wasn’t perfect, but there was a sense of legitimacy in our culture. We know that it can be regained, but we’re not sure how to get there without the necessary hard times. The only reason those hard times are necessary is because we are people created in the image of Adam. Yes, we are in the image of God, but we have not been able to shake off the image of Adam as well and that stain will exist in our species until the return of Jesus.
It is no mistake that the hard-nosed veteran who ran his ship outside the norms of society was named “Adama.” And there is a lesson to be learned here. If you want to survive this crooked generation, you will need to be willing to live in a way that places you out of step with the prevailing culture. Seek a position of leadership, in your home, your church, your community. Refuse to go along with the lunacy of DEI initiatives and quotas. Reject the seperate drinking fountains that the soccer moms are trying to insist upon and tell them why you will not just go with it. I will go with fan fiction while watching Sci-Fi, not while engaging with the real world, which was purchased by the blood of Jesus. All authority on Heaven and on Earth belongs to Jesus. Live like it.
Begin a project that is too big for you to finish in your lifetime. Then go and make disciples from your family and from without. Infect them with the same ideal that you started that project to accomplish. Pass it off to them while you can watch them run with it.
None of this is thought of as “wise” in our day. Meanwhile, there are beautiful churches in Europe that took 400 years to finish. The men who laid the foundation knew they would never worship in that structure. And they kept working all the same. Whatever you do, do to the glory of God!
Is this the way out of the cycle listed above? Not in my lifetime, but I believe it is a piece of it down the road. The days after WWII were better than the days after the Civil War. The days after what is ahead will be better still. And God has promised that one day all the world will worship Him. Live you life as if you believe this will happen, and on this side of the second coming! I doubt that God would ever be disappointed in you if you refused to be pessimistic about His plan for the world. You know, the one where He would remain with us to the end, empowering our work.
Now go! Make disciples, baptising them and teaching them to obey all that God has told us! We have lost one civilization. The next one is coming! It always does.
