![[1]](https://img.comicfury.com/comics/158/5270a1538226212f2045756678.png)
Average Rating: 5 (1 votes) Rate this comic
Author Notes:
I argued that fantasy and science fiction use very similar archetypes, but not to the same effectiveness. "City on the Edge of Forever," an episode from the original Star Trek, illustrates my point pretty well. Kirk and the gang travel back and time to meet a philanthropic woman who feeds the homeless and preaches to them. Only the story goes that creator Gene Roddenberry ordered changes to the script, presumably to remove the religious message. So the woman's sermon to the homeless is, "Take hope, someday we'll have spaceships." Thanks, that makes me feel better about my abject poverty. What's most irksome about that scene is the way she waxes poetic about atomic power. At the time, most other sci-fi writers were living in dread of the atom bomb, but Roddenberry was still clinging to Vernian optimism.
So here we have fantasy/religious archetypes like gods and the eternal, and science fiction replaces them with aliens and technology, but in my opinion, doing so removes a lot of the existential comfort.
Carl Sagan, referring to the importance of contacting aliens, said, "When we know who they are, we'll know who we are." Frank Peretti joked that if we ever get a message from space, it will be saying the same thing: "When we know who they are, we'll know who we are..." We look around at a crumbling world and place our eternal hope in material creatures or naturalist narratives that only offer hope for one brief mortal lifetime.
Science fiction is fantasy with a limp.
User comments:
Science is neat. It does not offer hope. After the early works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, which believed man's scientific accomplishments would save him, you can see the genre take a dip toward nihilism with the advent of nuclear bombs. Man's scientific accomplishments could very well DESTROY him. By the time Gene Roddenberry was peddling what Harlan Ellison called "dopey utopian bullshit," science fiction had become despairing and was becoming increasingly moreso. Now we have cyperpunk dystopias. "Where is my flying car? Where is my cure for this disease?" With more material comforts than ancient people could ever have dreamed, we are more depressed and suicidal than ever.
One would most certainly feel cynical, and would be justified in being downright bitter, if God turned out to be a lie. There are enough reasonably rational arguments as well as empirical arguments, and legal-historical proofs, to take a chance on Jesus. I think you would have an easier time proving that Abraham Lincoln did not exist.
Yeah. With science advancing more and more, delivering more and more answers, why is that? Maybe more and more people realize that God won't save them either?
> One would most certainly feel cynical, and would be justified in being downright bitter, if God turned out to be a lie.
Indeed, it's not easy. I for one didn't like it. But I learned to live with it.
> There are enough reasonably rational arguments as well as empirical arguments, ...
Oh, so the page behind that joke is not a joke. Gotcha, I say :D
As you probably know, Christians are the only religious group who believe in Jesus Christ (thus the name), Jews and Moslems, whose religion is also based on the Old Testament, don't recognize Jesus as a savior. Hmm... They'll all go to hell, since no one died for their sins, isn't it? ;-)