I was wondering if this could be a thread where we can try to piece together Baltar’s “teachings” to get a better idea of what he’s really preaching. We don’t hear too many of his sermons, particularly in the second half of season 4.0, but we do hear him in the background, and I guess I’m curious what we can (re)construct of what he says and what comes of it (keeping in mind the interest expressed in theology and scifi, as well as thoughts on Baltar as Moses, Baltar as John the Baptist, etc).
To get things started (and because I don’t have any more right now), here’s something I wrote up from the last scene in Escape Velocity, though it’s not complete (I was only paying attention to when it cut to the FF):
Image of Anders: B says, “If we don’t love ourselves, how can we love others?” Cut to Demetrius. “And when we know what we are, then we can find the truth out about others. See what they are [zooming on Sleeping Kara] The truth about them. And you know what the truth is? [Shift camera view towards Anders] The truth about them? [Anders leans in towards Starbuck] About you?”
when i first saw this, i was completely excited to see the demetrius, the music started getting exciting, drums started pounding, i was expecting something big to happen… then of course nothing did. and then the episode ended. and i totally missed everything baltar was saying. then when i saw it again, i was like, holy crap! a shot of kara and anders while baltar says “when we know what we are (anders now knows what he is), then we can find the truth out about others.” red herring or prophecy?
and it’s been said alot that baltar is a survivalist, so i thought it would be funny to list all the things he’s survived.
Nuclear explosion, then escape with the only humans left alive - miniseries
Survive Six (shelley godfree, (god-free??)) accusing him of treason - Six Degrees of Separation
Luckily points to the perfect spot on the cylon’s tylium asteroid for Lee to blow it up, saving the human race. - Hand of god
Survives a raptor crash on kobol and is successfully rescued. - end of s1, beginning of s2
then we skip to new caprica, where he survives the exodus. - exodus pt II
He convinces the cylons to let him stay aboard their basehip - collaborators or torn…
He survives the algae planet standoff - Rapture
He survives getting drugged by Adama/Roslina and then stabbed by Gaeta - taking a break…
He is declared not guilty in his trial - crossroads pt II
He is protected and taken in as a leader by his cult - crossroads pt II / he that believeth…
He survives Connor’s attack on him in the bathroom - He that believeth…
He survives getting impaled by a centurion - the Hub
wow. 12. hey ummm 12…
not to mention he’s slept with all the female cylons except sharon, but he kissed her in kobol’s last gleaming pt. I.
sry casilda this was unrelated to your topic but i saw a baltar thread and wanted to post:-)
I was always disappointed that we didn’t get much information on what the Balcubines believed in beyond the One True God. Particularly, I’m curious what they think of the Cylons, since they believe the Cylons are worshiping the “right” god. Did they see Baltar as a prime spiritual leader because of his close contact with the Cylons, because he’d lived amongst them on the baseship and might have returned with special knowledge about this god from them? Maybe some of the Balcubines were members of the group that wanted to forge a truce with the Cylons back in S2? The world may never know.
Ooh, I love Baltar’s speech and the related scenes. I’ll take a crack at these…
The image of Tigh (being kissed by Caprica): Voiceover, Baltar begins his speech “I am not a priest.”
Maybe Caprica Six and Tigh are not sinless or even especially qualified people to absolve each other from sin, like a priest would be, yet they’re stumbling through and finding ways to help each other forgive themselves? Caprica does seem to kiss Tigh in a strangely holy attitude; obviously there’s some strange implied sex in there, too, but she does say she’s doing the beating and the kissing to help Saul escape from his guilt. Isn’t kissing involved in blessings sometimes (obviously not the kind of kissing Cap Six was doing, but she’s new to this)? And the beating was almost like assisted self-flagellation. Also, it’s an interesting juxtaposition with the other image of “consecrating the sin” in this episode, which is Tory’s S&M interlude with Baltar.
Image of Tory: Baltar says “Something in the Universe Loves Me” - cut to Tory and HeadSix. Later, in silence, no HeadSix. Then, “God only loves that which is perfect, and he loves you” [Tory laughs, HeadSix at her side] Second to last shot of the episode is a smiling Tory with HeadSix.
I think this is mostly the glee of Gaius’s two spiritual influences seeing him finally buy into their messages. Head Six has been saying all along that she’s proof that God loves the entity that is Gaius Baltar, and she’s thrilled that her message is finally clicking in Baltar’s mind. Tory gave Baltar the idea of perfection via God’s love rather than acts during the S&M session. She is also drawn to Baltarism because it apparently preaches some acceptance of the Cylons as having real feelings and being on the right track in terms of their monotheism.
(Side note: I love how this episode plays with the idea of the difference between the message and the messenger. When Tory says the “we’re perfect” stuff, it sounds like utter madness. When Baltar says it, it sounds very poetic and very, very enticing, but because this is Baltar, you’re left with an eerie sense of how wrong this could go. At the same time, that part of the speech reminds me a lot of descriptions of grace in Methodism, yet even though the words are quite similar, I got a completely different feeling when blue-haired seventy-year-old Midwestern church ladies were talking about the same thing than when Baltar or Tory talked about it.)
Image of Galen: B says: "But you have to look, deep (the spark). Love your faults [Galen watches Nicky] Embrace them [Nicky looks at Galen] If God embraces them, then how can they be faults? [Focus on Galen’s eyes]
When he had the hallucination/projection in the bar with Adama, we saw that Chief was at least subconsciously worried that Cally “committed suicide” because he was a Cylon (“mother to a halfbreed abomination”). It seems he’s worried that his son is tainted because he, Galen Tyrol, is one big walking “fault”–a Cylon abomination. Maybe he’s even seeing Nicky as a symbol of the mistakes he made with Boomer and Cally, not accepting Boomer for who she was and marrying Cally when he knew in his gut he was “settling for the best of limited options.” The scene seems to be asking the question of whether Tyrol is willing to embrace both his own Cylonity and his son’s for the sake of his son. Seeing an innocent child and knowing that he, too, is at least part Cylon might have a material effect on Tyrol coming to accept that his own identity doesn’t in and of itself make him “bad” or “evil.”
(Side note: When Tyrol tells Adama about settling and says “because the ones that we really wanted, the really loved are dead–or dying–or turned out to be Cylons and they didn’t know…,” why do you suppose he throws the “dying” in? Is it that obvious to everybody that Adama is in love with Roslin? Or who else could he be talking about?)
Image of Anders: B says, “If we don’t love ourselves, how can we love others?” Cut to Demetrius. “And when we know what we are, then we can find the truth out about others. See what they are [zooming on Sleeping Kara] The truth about them. And you know what the truth is? [Shift camera view towards Anders] The truth about them? [Anders leans in towards Starbuck] About you?”
On the literal level, I get the feeling that Anders is so close to just blurting out to Kara that he’s a Cylon. It’s killing him not to tell her, because he’s really, really hoping, what with her coming back from the dead and being able to “hear” the road to Earth and all, that she’s a Cylon, too. On a more philosophical level, Baltar seems to be elaborating on “know thyself,” perhaps even the idea that both humans and Cylons have to see and acknowledge both the good and the bad in themselves to understand the complexity and legitimacy of the Other? Maybe that’s a stretch, but I like it.
I keep being drawn back to the idea of divine love as an assignment of human actions, which was such a prevalent theme in “Faith.” Baltar’s speech is about God’s love and belief in the perfection of all humans (and Cylons, too, it would seem), but the cuts to the Final Fivers all suggest the impact this kind of soul-searching, forgiveness, and acceptance of the self and others has on people and their relationships with one another, regardless of a relationship to a separate, divine being.
Also, I looked at the transcript for “Faith,” and here’s a few bits from Baltar’s wireless sermon that might be worth looking at:
“… The undiscovered country…” (channeling Hamlet or Trek, it appears )
“…God doesn’t really care how many good deeds we’ve done. This is the mistake that I find that so many of the pious…”
“…You no longer need to fear the unknown. Because he will take your hand and guide you to the other side of the river. What river am I talking about? I’m talking about the river that separates this world from the next. There is more to reality than the things that we can touch, taste, or even see with our naked eyes. There is another realm…”
This last one, I like a lot. I get the feeling at the end of the episode that Roslin isn’t necessarily buying into “Baltar’s horse manure,” as Adama says, but that she’s become more in awe of and gained respect for the unknown rather than living in fear of it. (In that sense, Laura takes a parallel journey to Kara’s in “Maelstrom,” but they deviate in that Kara’s journey leads to an acceptance of her special destiny, whereas Laura’s leads her to accept that she may not be right about the destiny she thought she had. But, I digress.)
Roslin has almost always dealt with the dread of dying by imbuing her death with a purpose, by interpreting herself as the Dying Leader, but she’s been very bothered by Adama’s cruel but very accurate dig in their argument in “Six of One” that she may not be the Dying Leader and her death may be as meaningless as everybody else’s. Baltarism is not just something that’s upsetting the fundamentalist civilians still crammed on Galactica; its preaching that the old gods don’t exist throws Roslin’s only means of coping with her own death into chaos.
Roslin’s journey with Emily and, by odd extension, with Baltar’s voice, opens her up to the possibility that even if she isn’t right, if she isn’t the Dying Leader, that doesn’t mean that the black abyss is the only other alternative. It seems that Roslin is a person who has never handled uncertainty within herself very well; when she makes a decision, she comes up with a course of action and a set of reasons to justify that course, then digs in and holds on for dear life. Accepting that not all questions are meant to have solid answers and that uncertainty and doubt are not necessarily bad things is a big step for her, and the fact that Baltar helps her take that step is pretty amazing.
Kappa, in particular the third quote you have (from Faith) - I wonder what the “he” is, would that be the divine? Or might Baltar be positing an intermediary figure?
the second quote is very protestant. by faith alone, evidently
Interesting development in Sometimes a Great Notion: Baltar wears his “scientist hat” much more than his “religious leader” hat. Curiouser and curiouser…
True, but now that the prophisies of Pythia have failed to deliver unto them a land of milk and honey on a silver platter and with their faith in those old prophesies crumbling I think we should logically expect Baltar’s religion to pick up some real steam and for Baltar to become a much more powerful character.
They have lost hope. Earth was something they could beleive in, and now it’s gone. Perfect time for Baltart to step in and provide an alternative, especially since Roslin is in full meltdown mode and isn’t providing leadership. Baltar will keep the fleet together mentally while Adama tries to move them physically.
Careful there - you might start something unstoppable… Wouldn’t be the first time SF has started a real-world religion. Mind you, given a choice between The Church of Baltar and something like that of L Ron Hubbard I’d go for the former. Hell, maybe it would be cool. In fact, sign me up
Yeah, I’m still having trouble with Adama’s logic on that one; giving Baltar and the smiting woman guns is never a good idea, no matter how drunk you are.
Baltar’s theology used to have a message to it, but I think that’s all gone out the window–now it truly is just a cult of personality. That would make it very ironic if the monotheists “declared war” on the Sons of Ares polytheists, after they’d essentially given up on any kind of coherent belief in a loving One True God. Even so, I find it interesting that Head Six is still trying to lead Baltar somewhere. Maybe she knows Cavil is coming and she’s arming them for the final showdown?
Have you noticed that the one who took over while Baltar was gone is named Paula?
Didn’t Paul (formerly Saul - a religious heavy enforcer of sorts) have visions of Jesus in the desert and become the leader of the Christian religion after Jesus’ death, pushing (according to some theories) Mary Magdalene and other women preachers out? So what if here we have Paula taking over and pushing out the men? There are not a lot of men around the ‘One God’ cult.
To be fair there were never many men there - but yeah Paul. Oh, Paul. The Road to Damascus conversion story is cool, but a bunch of his letters? Me no like so much, as a woman who has opinions and what not.
For a while earlier in 4.0 I believed that Baltar was coming to believe in his new religion and what he was preaching. But ever since the conversation he had with Roslin waiting to flee from Galactica, I think it’s pretty clear his belief is pretty shallow. He is such a fraud and soooo very transparent. I love him. I hate him.
As for what he has been professing to believe up to now, I think you can pick up any Wayne Dyer book and find the same stuff.
As mentioned, Paul wrote some great letters but felt very firmly that women were to know their place (and even went so far as to say that if you can abstain you should not get marriage, that wedding a partner served the singular purpose of making normal marital activities acceptable before God’s eyes.
I wouldn’t draw much between Paula and Paul from the New Testament. But it is interesting, watching Baltar’s dynamic with her.
is it just me or was the leader of the sons of ares enzo, kat’s drug-runner-boyfriend from the passage?? that would make sense with the line “it figures the sons of areas would be in the food supply business.”
