Faith, Astrology, And Cylons

For those of you who haven't watched "Battlestar Galactica," two assignments today:

1) Get to work buying, downloading, or stealing all four seasons of the new "Battlestar Galactica." You know, deep in your heart, that you want a week off from work... and BSG is the best way you could spend it.

2) Have a look at today's choice re-runs here:

The Feast Of Chiron

Transits: Awaiting The Divine Hammer Blow

...then skip over the rest of this entry until you're caught up on Battlestar Galactica. You'll thank me later.

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Battlestar Galactica ended last Friday. The series had always been good at throwing surprises at its fans, and the show ended with what was a huge surprise for some, and no surprise at all for others:

Battlestar Galactica was a four-year-long parable about faith, reincarnation, human nature, and destiny.

Doctor Gaius Baltar wasn't exactly the "bad guy" of the series... that role more naturally falls to a race of genocidal religious-fanatic robots, The Cylons. Creator/producer Ron Moore once described Baltar as "the most human of the human characters." This, as you can well imagine, certainly made him look like a villain at times. In the first two hours of the series, he violated security protocols and (unwittingly) enabled the Cylons... rampaging race of rebellious robots... to launch a sneak attack on Humanity, almost completely wiping it out.

From that point onward, Baltar spent most of his time covering his ass regarding his guilt in this, and in various other schemes/plots/lies all intended to further cover his complicity in the near-annihilation of the human race. Baltar has at times struggled towards The Light, but in true human form, he fell short. Repeatedly.

The crux of the entire series fell to a single conversation between Baltar and Cavil (the leader of the Cylons, and perhaps the only true atheist on the show) who held a gun to the head of a child who turned out to be of vital importance to both sides. And in that one scene, Baltar redeems himself... both as a person, and in a larger, spiritual sense.

And, in my humble opinion... coming from someone who has Saturn in the Ninth House, someone who has always been secretly annoyed by the dogma and irrationality that spirituality (and yes, astrology) often come coated in... words of Great Truth were spoken that night:

Baltar: I may be mad, but that doesn't mean that I'm not right. Because there's another force at work here; there always has been. It's undeniable. We've all experienced it. Everyone in this room has witnessed events that they can't fathom, let alone explain away by rational means. Puzzles deciphered in prophecy. Dreams given to a chosen few... whether we want to call that God or gods or some sublime inspiration or a divine force we can't know or understand, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's here. It exists. And our two destinies are entwined in its force.

Cavil: If that's true, and that's a big if, how do I know that this force has our best interests in mind? How do you know that God is on your side, Doctor?

Baltar: I don't. God's not on any one side. God's a force of nature, beyond good and evil. Good and evil, we created those. Want to break the cycle? Break the cycle of birth, death, rebirth, destruction, escape, death. Well, that's in our hands, and our hands only. It requires a leap of faith. It requires that we live in hope, not fear.

Thank you Ron Moore... and thank you Battlestar Galactica... for making it a little easier to believe in something greater, surrounded as we are by dogma, machines, and intolerance. Thank you.

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