Ok somebody is getting their wish I have been sucked in...
One thing I would add to that: with the kind of faith portrayed in BSG TOS (which had many parallels with Mormonism and with generic Christianity) the faith was a positive source of good for society. That which benefits individual people, one at a time, inevitably benefits society as a whole. Just as one example: in our real world, Christians have often been founders of hospitals. Christians care about healing, the spending of effort to rescue the weak and the incapacitated.
Christians have also been responsible for the destruction of entire belief systems and the destruction of entire peoples. When I look at how we treated the native peoples of various countries including my own. Before “Christians” arrived here in BC and “civilized” them, the native peoples had a culture rich in spiritual practices. We told them that their beliefs were wrong. Yet they had a strong spiritual connection to the land that involved seeing all forms of life as being precious and worthy of respect and acknowledged the gift of life surrendered so that they could eat by offering a ceremony of thanks to the life (be it tree or animal).
Today in our Christianity we have almost destroyed out natural resources her in BC the trees the fish and it’s never enough we still want more.
Native peoples did not have need of jails or external policing system they policed themselves. Do we?
Leaders accumulated possessions for the sole purpose of redistribution among other members of their extended family the more you gave away the more you gained in status. We outlawed this behaviour made it illegal a criminal offence for them to have potlatches we confiscated their amassed wealth and sold to museums.
We took their children from them by force at a very young age put them in residential schools made it compulsory and forbade them to speak their native language. They were also forbidden to have any contact with family members including those at the schools. They were forbidden to practice their own spiritual beliefs at the school and forced to adopt the Christian faith. Many of the residential school teachers that taught at these schools were rejected from teaching in the public school system (for the non natives) for various reasons, like physical abuse. Children grew up in these institutions most often not seeing their families again until they graduated. At which time unable to speak the language of their parents and elders or follow traditional teachings, denied the contact of a loving and warm family experience, raised by strangers who did not parent but simply enforced rules unable to parent themselves having never experienced it nor seen it, unable to get jobs off the reserves and none to be found on the reserves, these children of the Residential school system were lost facing a legacy of poverty, suicide and alcoholism and went on to beget the next lost generation. And it you think this was a long time ago well this happened in my parents time and they are still alive. As late as 1951 which I believe was just a couple years before some of you were born native peoples of Canada were forbidden to have legal representation. And as late as 1960 which is just 4 years before I was born they were not allowed to vote.
There is a Christian church here in Vancouver that will feed those stranded on the street who are hungry and homeless the only catch is that if they want to eat and sleep in a warm place they have to listen to a sermon. That sounds a lot like blackmail to me! Why not spread the word so to speak by modeling not blackmail.
That’s quite a bit different from a Darwinian world where the strong survive and the weak provide food for the strong,
Darwin’s belief of “survival of the fittest” went through many revisions over the years and publications of his theory yet for some reason we only ever seem to quote the original version and not the amended versions. With that original statement the idea was simply a possible explanation for why certain characteristics are more prominent in a species and therefore why certain individuals of a species are more successful in their survival than others. Success, fitness, strength had nothing to do with anything other than the ability of the present generation to live long enough to procreate the next generation. Somehow over the years people have put their own spin on it probably due to Hollywood’s interpretation.
and the universe itself does not care who wins and who dies because impersonal matter cannot care about anything.
I’m not sure why you feel they are mutually exclusive or why living beings don’t care about anything in this version of the world.
Believing in a personal God who actually cares about me yields results drastically different from believing in an impersonal universe which does not care whether I am good or evil, strong or weak, dead or alive.
Why would Darwin’s theory make you think that it is just an explanation for why we certain members of a species do better than others and why we have the particular characteristics we do, it doesn’t negate the existence of a God. God could very well have given each species a myriad of adaptable options that through the selection process appear or disappear depending on the need.
Am I “proselytizing” for my faith? Naw, I don’t think so. Just talking about what I care about. Plus I like the often-used description that a Christian is like a beggar who has found bread, and is eager to let other people know where it can be found. Anybody who’s not hungry doesn’t have to come, but there are lots of spiritually hungry people in the world. . .
And for those of us who are not spiritually hungry and know where the “food” is if we ever get hungry why the need to constantly tell us? Why knock on my door every Sunday or stand at the sky train entrance with magazines that spell out the immanent end to mans immortal soul if we don’t change our wicked ways?
yes I know this had nothing to do with BSG but I have to go now it's fathers day...Happy Fathers Day!
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