Stargate and theology keep running head-long into each other these days. Most recently it's this thought: the Stargate paradigm has the good guys and the bad guys evolving in their separate moral states. The Goa'uld evolve from the primordial soup totally evil; Mankind evolves from the primordial soup basically good.
Then I look at the Real World and notice a couple of things: the actual tendency of Mankind is to devolve into Goa'uld-like behavior. When left to ourselves we spiral down, not up. Every form of life on Earth plays it out in microcosm or macrocosm. The Law of Entropy goes one way, and one way only.
Based on that Law and observable past consistencies, we should all be Goa'ulds by now.
But we're not.
And this is where the Stargate paradigm (and post-moderns in general) get confused. They assume that since we haven't all descended into Hitler-esque behavior, we must have started out good. But then they have a little trouble with that darn Law of Entropy again, and what to do with Hitler. The show (and much of our culture) seems to ignore the discrepancy. But there are enough incongruities to convince me that Something Else must have happened.
The most logical answer is that Mankind started out as evil as the Goa'uld, but that many were rescued. Enough, in fact, to set up safe societies, just laws, soup kitchens. (This even happens in the show-- the good guys just can't quite help saving what so obviously needs saving, even from an "accident of evolution".) Basically the fact that we are not all miniature Hitlers and Maos and Stalins allows me to work backwards and add credence to my existing belief: "I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior."
If the writers of a show which specifically depicts the battle between good and evil were intellectually honest, they would have given up by now; they would all be writing cheap horror scripts in the back of some trailer and getting drunk by ten in the morning. But they aren't. Any more than the average person turns into a Hitler. Because not very far below the surface resides that core-deep belief that there is a Creator, and that He is good. They can't escape it.
Because the clever Man put it there.
1 comment:
Good word, Bryce. No, I'm saying that based on my model, Hitler DID have a core-deep belief in a Good Creator. Because God placed it in every creature. This is why all creation groans, etc. I would imagine, however, that the belief was buried, drowned, wounded, silenced out of self-preservation. I mean, how would YOU live with yourself if you were Hitler and you suddenly let out of Pandora's Box that there IS a kind, Good Creator of ALL mankind? Maybe that's what happened in the end. Although I'm guessing his demons just finally got the better of him. Poor man.
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