SG1: Seth

[Wargriffin]

From God, To Kane, To Seth.

It all makes sense now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQiwNZzoVA

Power shifts quickly in the brotherhood

[Morgaine]

From God, To Kane, To Seth.

It all makes sense now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQiwNZzoVA

Power shifts quickly in the brotherhood

Silly Seth, that's not where they keep the Stargate.

[Beastro]

By hardcore Christians I refer to Christians who'd actually care about interpretations of their particular mythology on a silly sci fi show about MacGuyver fighting space aliens enough to get angry over it.

And me as well.

The show was already clearly nose diving with the human Replicators, Ascension widening the scope so far that it couldn't properly handle it nor was there any other direction to go, but for me the Ori were the last nail in the coffin in that it was clear that they wanted to touch on religiously motivated war and violence that was very topical since 9/11 and the War on Terror but didn't have the balls to actually make them not-Muslims and unwilling to make an abstract alien religion, using the same old Christian motifs. I can and have tolerated a lot of fiction that mulls over Christianity, if not outright bashing, like His Dark Materials, but I'm sick of Christianity being the safe punching bag when people want to deal with other religions or religion in general.

Having humans that had evolved in an entirely separate universe by the Ori be Medieval Europeans that dress up like Crusaders when on the war path with many other things being Catholicism only slightly altered, I gave up and everything afterwards when I checked in only confirmed things as it went on.

Heck, I was forbidden from playing the Legend of Zelda series of video games (which, at this point, only existed through Link to the Past), because they had too many uncomfortable religious undertones. She was also bothered by extremely tame references in a couple of the "Garfield" TV movies, and once called our local PBS affiliate to bitch at whatever poor schmuck they had answering the phones after Rockapella sang "Zombie Jamboree" on an episode of the old Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego game show.

You cannot appease this crowd. It is foolish to try. And people outside of that crowd will generally have thick enough skin to be a grown-up about it.

I'd say this centers around exactly how neurotic ones family/parents are, not over how committed they are to Christianity.

To me, that speaks less of a deep commitment and more of an insecurity that leads people's faith to shatter like glass when exposed to even minor things that run contrary to how they were raised. It reminds me in the same way of how devastated people can become to the reality of the world if they were isolated and kept naive enough to think that evil doesn't exist to the degree it does. That might very well be the root cause of conditions like PTSD, where an event never thought possible completely destroys someone's framework of how the world is if only even if it's only never considering yourself capable to blown someone else's body into horrific fragments and then as a soldier you do just that and now realize you don't know anything about who you are.

[CrypticMirror]

it was clear that they wanted to touch on religiously motivated war and violence that was very topical since 9/11 and the War on Terror but didn't have the balls to actually make them not-Muslims and unwilling to make an abstract alien religion, using the same old Christian motifs. I can and have tolerated a lot of fiction that mulls over Christianity, if not outright bashing, like His Dark Materials, but I'm sick of Christianity being the safe punching bag when people want to deal with other religions or religion in general.

With everyone else lining up to take a pop at the "Muslims" in that time period (coded language for "brown people") I think it was far braver of them to examine Christianity's flaws. It was something they "didn't have the balls" to do in the Goauld seasons, in fact. To be honest, it seems to me that following 9/11 the Muslim religion and Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims got used far more as a punching bag than any Christians ever did. I would argue that in Western works they really ought to be tackling the dominant religion of the West anyway; in a world where everyone is treating the Muslim as an easy enemy, there really does need to be an exploration of the flaws and hypocrisies inherent in our own religious paradigm. If that makes you feel defensive about your religion, then you should reflect more on your religion's flaws and how to solve them rather than just getting angry at them being pointed out. That is what Jesus said you should do anyway.

[Beastro]

With everyone else lining up to take a pop at the "Muslims" in that time period (coded language for "brown people") I think it was far braver of them to examine Christianity's flaws.

To be honest, it seems to me that following 9/11 the Muslim religion and Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims got used far more as a punching bag than any Christians ever did.

From my view during the period, people pulled their punches with Islam and continue to do not tackling the underlying issues of Dawah and Muhammad as the archetype for Muslims to to emulate which Islamist's are very much being consistent with.

What you have in parenthesis always what's accused of by those with issues against Islam then and now and it's never held water with me and what I've seen of most people in the West in last 16 years especially when some BNP type rough up Sikhs, Hindus or a Muslims that were very clearly innocent people going about their day as an act of bullying.

It was something they "didn't have the balls" to do in the Goauld seasons, in fact.

The one that stood out to me was amusingly enough at the start of the Ori with a little exchange between Landry and Mitchell as limp wristed disclaimer almost that "Ori are God, we all know God is good and he wouldn't do this.

I would argue that in Western works they really ought to be tackling the dominant religion of the West anyway; in a world where everyone is treating the Muslim as an easy enemy, there really does need to be an exploration of the flaws and hypocrisies inherent in our own religious paradigm.

Which they have been doing, for decades if not centuries, and in line SG-1 went with the typical motifs of religious fanaticism in shows whenever it's presented.

Let me make it clear, I don't want a simple easy enemy or bashing, but an actual look at the problems plaguing Islam just as the West has done with Christianity.

If that makes you feel defensive about your religion, then you should reflect more on your religion's flaws and how to solve them rather than just getting angry at them being pointed out. That is what Jesus said you should do anyway.

I do, every day and work to try and change them being who I am and how I interact with people and the world at large. I get tired of the safe punching bag BS (which I hate in general, it makes many 90s action films tiresome with the generic Middle Eastern Terrorist as the big baddie with nothing complex beneath their motivations), which I'll also make clear is not what I conflate with works that deal with Christianity directly or use our religion in a very bizarre fashion, like much anime and Japanese video games do (which is par for course given how we in the West treat their things when we want to add flavour to things like fantasy or filling out a RPGs bestiary). It is not those issues being pointed out that bugs me as I myself have issues with how many Christians handle their faith that have impacted my life, not simply with people coming in front loaded expecting the typical fundie stereotype when they hear what denomination I'm from (I recall a thread on ballistic missile defence when my old MMO guild was openly befuddled by what I knew, since in their minds to be Christian was to be as dumb as rocks, and to not be was to be intelligent that made me despair seeing the other side of the coin of the typical opinion about atheists that many Christians have), but also the fact I witnessed and suffered the outright hypocrisy and other terrible things that Christians are caught up in from the issues of when someone is too self-sacrificing within my mothers line to the problems of domestic abuse in Anabaptist denominations that particularly rankles me due to their much spoken of deep commitment to Pacifism that I see in my fathers that goes back centuries and made him into a sociopathic monster.

It is not something that I spend a great deal of time fuming over, it bugs me, and out of many posts on this topic over the years, this is a moment when I expressed it. If it got to me more I'd have long since shut out almost all fiction like Durandal's mother tried to do, something that is dangerously foolish and sets a bad precedence in a parent to isolate a child from differing opinions. But no, I continue my love of Sci-Fi and many any other genres that I inherited from my family which have had their own moments in making me roll my eyes.

We all have things that do that to us, and simply because I comment on them in this thread does not mean they are any more than that. In the case of SG-1 I was already falling over the fence into giving up for the reasons I've stated above, they had one more chance and to me, it was the usual without anything different being done (something which in their own ways Atlantis and Universe did and why I quickly dropped them).

[Madner Kami]

For me as an atheist, it is hard to watch a piece that criticizes atheists, because whether that piece adresses an issue that is respresented within me or is completely alien to my personality, I still feel adressed on a personal level. I can't help it, but be automatically... erm... offended, for lack of a better word. Whether I agree with the issue raised or not, I feel adressed, because being an atheist is such an integral part of my personality.
In Germany, we got this wonderful idiom: "The dog that gets hit, barks". It refers to a situation where a simple fact is called out, without adressing someone personally, and somebody takes up on it, reacting in a way that implies that he feels being adressed and called out. I can't think of a perfectly suiting idiom in english that fits the bill, but that's besides the point... Think long and hard about whether you are reacting to a criticism of christian faith, because you feel the critique is false or misguided, or because you are a christian.

[Beastro]

Think long and hard about whether you are reacting to a criticism of christian faith, because you feel the critique is false or misguided, or because you are a christian.

I have and have not been blinded by conflating the two. Something that comes right to to mind would what would qualify as my most favorite JRPG from my childhood, Xenogears. A quick skim of it will show it doesn't handle the Judeo-Christain themes and motifs it uses with kid gloves, like how your mentor and best buddy all the way through the game is Citan (doesn't take much to realize how that's named after despite the censors), right down the fact that the big bad is named Deus.

For me as an atheist, it is hard to watch a piece that criticizes atheists, because whether that piece adresses an issue that is respresented within me or is completely alien to my personality, I still feel adressed on a personal level. I can't help it, but be automatically... erm... offended, for lack of a better word. Whether I agree with the issue raised or not, I feel adressed, because being an atheist is such an integral part of my personality.

For me it can be annoying knowing what many Christians think of atheists hearing opinions behind closed doors as well as checking myself to remind me of the differences of individuals, especially between those I know and their positions and the typical antics of many atheists on the seedier side of the internet.

[Deledrius]

For me as an atheist, it is hard to watch a piece that criticizes atheists, because whether that piece addresses an issue that is represented within me or is completely alien to my personality, I still feel addressed on a personal level.

It really doesn't help that most media critique of atheism tends to be against a straw atheism, perhaps even more so than the usual treatment that things like Christianity receives. I think it's mostly from lack of familiarity than direct malice (though propaganda films like God's Not Dead are obviously misrepresenting things with intent), but that doesn't make the situation any better.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

A few points:

- Sure, people shouldn't waste their time being overly offended if a television show decides to critique their beliefs. On the other hand, it would be understandable if someone took "Jesus/Yahweh as Goa'uld" as a direct insult, and given the fact that it's just a light sci-fi show, I wouldn't blame anyone if they decided the show was no longer for them.

- Back in the day, Stargate's fanbase struck me as a relatively conservative one. I remember a pretty vocal subset of fans on Gateworld who hated BSG for its dark subject matter and "edginess" well before any of the more divisive episodes of that show. There was also controversy over some of the subject material/content on Universe, and of course the Ori. Even if only a small percentage of the viewer base would have had a problem, Stargate was nearly canceled several times, so even losing a couple hundred thousand viewers wouldn't be good.

- Most importantly and despite the show's subject matter, I don't think the show's producers and writers were ever actually interested in religion bashing. Sure, there were the Ori, but I take them at their word when they say that it's "extremism" that they intended to address, and imo they were just as interested in getting a Medieval feel as anything else. If they had actually wanted to get on a soapbox they had plenty of opportunities. When they finally decided to try to try their hand at "seriousness" with Universe, they went with some of the light spirituality and allusions to faith, which is the approach that a lot of shows end of taking.

[Beastro]

- Most importantly and despite the show's subject matter, I don't think the show's producers and writers were ever actually interested in religion bashing. Sure, there were the Ori, but I take them at their word when they say that it's "extremism" that they intended to address, and imo they were just as interested in getting a Medieval feel as anything else. If they had actually wanted to get on a soapbox they had plenty of opportunities. When they finally decided to try to try their hand at "seriousness" with Universe, they went with some of the light spirituality and allusions to faith, which is the approach that a lot of shows end of taking.

It in no way went into religious bashing and it it went so far as to undermine itself in little ways coming off pussy footing. The exchange between Landry and Mitchell is the one that stood out to me, as was what I vaguely recall of the Ori drawing from real religious texts in some way when making the Book of Origin. It was the part where one of the priests was preaching by a Stargate and Mitchell marched out from the gate toward him finishing off his lines by quoting the Bible.

I could see if they wanted a Medieval feeling to make the whole Merlin subplot mesh better, but from what I gather that was raised and then never really dealt with until the TV movie about it. It was at the very least a very half-hearted and limp attempt at integrating Camelot into Stagate.

The problem with Universe was not so much that they went too serious compared to what was established at the the expected tone of Stargate, the light-hearted one that complemented the odd episode of dead seriousness, but that they what can only be called "try hard". It came off more like an adolescent trying to act mature and tough than true maturity.

That and the fact it came out far too late behind the BSG remake that it was long stale as a imitator. That in and of itself isn't bad, original BSG was that very thing with regard to Star Wars, and despite the whole talk of rip off and legal trouble, it presented a very different and interesting take on the spiritual Sci-Fi kicked off by Star Wars. I just wish they'd had more of the episodes that approached good than the filler since they either went into the Colonies background or the Mormon spiritual undertones of the show, which I always find intriguing since whenever you settle into thinking it's going to be just straight up a Calcedonian Christian take someone comes up that reminds of of the reasons why Mormons hover on the periphery of Christainity despite being mostly run of the mill American Prods.