Hello, and Happy September!
It was a wonderful day in the Uplands of South Carolina today, btw. Hope yours was good.
I just got around to reading "SciFi's Brave New World" by James A. Herrick in the Feb. '09 edition of Christianity Today. It's a mindboggling piece that'll make you really think of where we're going as allegedly practicing, believing Christians. (If you're sure, feel free to take out the "allegedly" reference.) How does that old SS song go? "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands"?
Jimmy boy is Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope College (sorry, never heard of it) and here's his central thrust via the CT article, in my own interpretation: The God's myth "mythology" that is the Christian Gospel (Note: not because, as CS Lewis pointed out, it is fiction, but because it is a story that gives ultimate meaning) is being rejected, thanks to virtually every stand-up comedian and prime-time media outlet and militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Kitchens, and this mythology is being recast. Into what? Into what Herrick describes this way: "Ironically, the universe that science stripped of the supernatural is being resupplied with deities and redemptive purposes by science fiction writers and movie makers. Apparently, we cannot do without myths."
You got that right! But why can't we live without our myths? Hey, I'm just a blog writer, but my guess is we desperately need to believe in redemption, and in some sort of greater power. So what's the new supernatural? Well, it's the advanced and benevolent extraterrestrials of Star Trek and Star Wars and Close Encounters and ET, for example. (Hey, I loved every one of those movies and TV shows; and I worried over the outcome of Battlestar Galactica long and hard, but I still liked the ending.)
Furthermore, major scientists like Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, and Carl Sagan bought into some form of human contact with extraterrestrials, according to Herrick's article, whether it's panspermia (Earth was seeded with life from space), or space colonization, or highly evolved extraterrestrials, or genetically-enhanced post-humanity.
Apparently not worried about stepping on toes, Herrick also points out that SciFi author Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology, Mormonism, and the Nation of Islam all incorporate interplanetary narratives in their various teachings.
Let's spin off from this excellent article for a sec. Do we really believe that God is not cool, nor his Creation, nor his Son, nor his Spirit, but that somehow some soulless ball of protoplasm or silicon has the moral, ethical, spiritual, mental, and physical answers about Life in the future? Do we really think that? Do we really think that some form of superhuman or extraterrestrial is going to give a damn enough to "come on down" and straighten out our rather screwed up lives?
It's one thing to enjoy SciFi on the tube and in the flicks and even in the comic books if that floats your boat. But if we really start believing this rather brilliant but flawed fiction mythology, we are really in a bad place. As Herrick concludes: "Among the myriad redemptive myths displayed before us, it is time to remind ourselves that only one has ever been God's story."
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