Imagine how much shorter this whole process/series would have been if Starbuck had been able to key in the first set of jump coordinates back in the day 
But no-oooo.
When Starbuck was keying in the last jump coordinates, we were all watching and hollering âNo! It isnât going to be this easy! It canât be!â Next thing you know, boom! Earth, ho!
Just a (silly) thoughtâŚ
meh. Iâm OK with it.
Which is so weird I have to think about it.
I may come back and call you all bastards.
Just so you know.
She was too busy drinking and sleeping with the whole fleet to deal with her daddy issues to make her remember.
If Starbuck did have typed in the coordinates a couple of years earlier, (new-)Earth would have simply become another New Caprica. They were not ready.
Itâs like giving the car keys for a 12-y.oâŚthose 4 years between 12 and 16 do make a difference!
So instead god has them suffering and dying and struggling all over the frakkinâ universe for⌠for what???
Sorry, itâs just nonsensical. Such a stupid Christian idea of suffering in order to learn. Bollocks, I say.
This wonderful god allows 20 billion people to die, and then sets up an elaborate and confusing trail through the galaxy just so the remaining 35,000 people can abandon all technology and fade away?
Brilliant plan.
I wouldnât say the humans where not ready, but on the point that they would have been found by the Cylons and destroyed or enslaved I agree.
As long as the Cylon menace stayed they wouldnât have been safe anywhere. Especially with the Cylons searching earth as well.
Not necessarily a Christian idea.
It is, after all, a truism that you learn best from your mistakes. After all, a success might or might not tell you what you did right. A mistake WILL tell you (at least in part) what you did wrong.
Applied to life in general, this truism leads to some suffering and potential for harm. The burned hand teaches best ⌠but some burns are worse than others. Simply learning to drive a car is a Darwinian experience in Americaâthe chances of dying or suffering serious injury in a car driven by someone 16-21 are vastly higher than those of, say, 29-40. A friend of mine, who recently passed after complications, was almost completely paralyzed from the neck down after a simple swimming accident at age 16.
Life is Darwinian. Our choices can, and often do, determine our fates. Bad choices = bad fate OR challenges to overcome (often, both).
This isnât a Christian idea. They simply adopted it as Godâs motis operandae.
And who said their god is the same omnipotent, omniscient Abrahamic god you have in mind? It could be just some super-powerful intelligence that can guide here in there, e.g. through angels, but is not omnipotent, therefore it was not its choice to have the holocaust, it just tries to minimize the damage where possible, for instance directing some of the remaining towards Earth so they can survive through their offspring, instead of total mutual anihillation. A bit like we do with our kids, to their eyes we are super-powerful, but in truth we can just help them growing up and not let them do something extremely stupid, we are not omnipotent.
Sure, the God that Christians, Muslims etc believe here in our reality may be full of it, for reasons similar to the ones you mentioned (all the suffering, all the unnecessary pain), which is one of the many reasons why lots of people are atheists, but that is not necessarily the same god in BSG.
50 billion. But whatâs an additional 30 billion lives to âITâ?
So the computer from âI Have No Mouth And I Must Screamâ may be pulling the strings? Terrific. Harlan Ellison must be getting his copyright law suit ready.
I donât know, and I suppose the authors of BSG donât really know either. They left the identity of âitâ open for discussion. At the end each person may invent whatever they fancy (personally I donât care figuring out an explanation really, since there is no way to validate itâŚthis is all made up stuff, folks!).
I am just pointing out that in no moment was implied that the god in BSG is the abrahamic, omnipotent god most people in our western culture believe, so letâs not jump in conclusions from that premise. After all, as Chuck said many times in the podcasts, their universe is radically different from ours in the way that religion is actually true there. People donât make space-temporal jumps 'round here by simply holding an arrow.
I think rodbv is right to remind us all that even though the show makes a link to modern day US society, well, itâs still fiction.
And I agree also that the IT (to borrow OTâs coinage) doesnât map onto the God that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship - there are commonalities, but itâs not the same.
Yeah - I know. I just wanted to work the crabby old genius into the thread.
Never heard of this book, but sounds like fun, at least from the title. Do you recommend it?
Oh yeah. Itâs a short story/novella by one of the true masters. It has to be included in an anthology of Ellison short stories. But brace yourself. It remains very disturbing decades after it was written. You may end up wanting to throw your computer in the trash. Not that that would do any good.
I actually never bought the âreality of BSG religionâ point - at least until the unsettling finale.
There were rational non-religious explanations for most events, and this was a strength of BSG. It was ambiguous. Old farts like me, and Old Timer, could find comfort in not believing in powerful intervening entities. For once, an intelligent science fiction program which did not preach, which reflected some of the realities of human society and human behaviours, and held a measure of mystery - much like the real world.
Oh, BTW, the arrow thing didnât worry me greatly. The party was not transported, merely shown a hologram. Mind you, the supernova did put the wind up me!