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Briefly Noted: Battlestar Philosophica
When Ronald D. Moore’s re-imagined version of the hokey ’70s TV series Battlestar Galactica wrapped up this year, it all but abdicated responsibility for many of its major plot threads, leaving many fans lost in space. But despite its baffling finale, the four-season show, now available as a complete series on DVD, had a lot to offer.
The premise was your basic post-apocalyptic robots-chasing-humans story, but the show was more complicated than that. At its best, it investigated with care and intelligence the institutions that define a strong, moral civil society: the rule of law, markets, religion, military capability, representative democracy. Do they work? How? And what causes them to break down?
The show’s key idea seemed to be that, for a people on the brink of being wiped out, simply running away was never enough. Once a society has decided that it wants to live, it still has to figure out how.
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abercrombie milano|5.27.10 @ 5:38AM|#
My only point is that if you take the Bible straight, as I'm sure many of Reasons readers do, you will see a lot of the Old Testament stuff as absolutely insane. Even some cursory knowledge of Hebrew and doing some mathematics and logic will tell you that you really won't get the full deal by just doing regular skill english reading for those books. In other words, there's more to the books of the Bible than most will ever grasp. I'm not concerned that Mr. Crumb will go to hell or anything crazy like that! It's just that he, like many types of religionists, seems to take it literally, take it straight...the Bible's books were not written by straight laced divinity students in 3 piece suits who white wash religious beliefs as if God made them with clothes on...the Bible's books were written by people with very different mindsets..
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