|
-
Hivemind social net
-
News
- Features
- Blogs
- Events
Calendar
- Editorials
- Monthly
Zine
- Offworld
Report
- Our Daily
RSS Feed
- Google Toolbar scifi
- Movie/TV
Reviews
> Recent movies
> Movies by year
> Movies by title
- Book
Reviews
> Recent books
> Books by year
> Books by title
- Home
- Worlds
- Biography
- Bibliography
- Appearances
- Reviews
- Blog
- Community
- Press
- Links
Become
an Advertiser
- Web
Site Directory
- Search
the Net
- StephenHunt.net
- WoodenRocket.com
- Check
your E-mail
- Non Sci-Fi
News
|
Forbidden Power
01/09/2005 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Mark considers a recent article which rails against the film industry repeatedly doing versions of the Frankenstein myth in films. Science fiction films in which a mad scientist or a whole scientific community overstep the bounds to knowledge that God has put in placed in His Wisdom. They invent a new life form or drill a hole though the crust of the Earth or clone a dinosaur. In a sense these are all Frankenstein myths reframed. Arts and Letters Daily over at www.aldaily.com called my attention to an article by Chris Mooney in the American Prospect. The article "The Monster That Wouldn't Die: Why Hollywood never seems to get tired of the Frankenstein myth" can be found at www.prospect.org.
In the article, Mooney says that he gets very tired of the film industry repeatedly doing versions of the Frankenstein myth in films. Here he means not just films with the Frankenstein monster. He is looking at the broader meaning of the myth. He is looking at all science fiction films in which a mad scientist or a whole scientific community overstep the bounds to knowledge that God has put in placed in His Wisdom. They invent a new life form or drill a hole though the crust of the Earth or clone a dinosaur. In a sense these are all Frankenstein myths reframed.
As a direct result there is Divine Retribution. God somehow seems to find it necessary to punish not just the perpetrators of this blasphemy, but also their entire community and frequently the whole dang world. God apparently feels that everybody has sinned because they allowed this blasphemy to occur. This is a very scary interpretation of religion because it essentially says there is nobody innocent when one person oversteps the bounds placed by God. Those who would appear to be uninvolved are guilty of negligently allowing this impiety to occur in the same world that they share. The moral is that it then behooves everybody to police the world to be sure that God's laws are obeyed. Everyone has a responsibility to be a vigilante for God or will suffer the consequences. I hopefully do not have to remind the reader that that belief is very much in today's headlines.
This myth of the person who brings disaster by trying to achieve more than God allows goes back to Faust and the Sorcerer's Apprentice and the golem and the Tower of Babel and perhaps even to the Garden of Eden story. The belief is that there are things that a human was not meant to know. And if someone finding them out or otherwise breaking God's laws we are all in big trouble.
I personally cannot believe in knowledge that is actually prohibited by God. The Bible claims that are actions that are forbidden, but I know of no place where it says that there is information that is God's top secret knowledge, and we are forbidden to know it. The closest we get is eating of the Tree of Knowledge, whatever that means. And the Bible seems to have it be literal a tree and not metaphorical. The sin of Babel seems to be vanity.
In fact, I would like to think that if there is a God that He would want us to use our minds and to discover all that we can about the world. Just as an artist would want the people who see his work to understand and appreciate what they are seeing in his paintings, so too the more we understand the universe the more any God that I could respect would respect us.
However, religion throughout history has always been the ally of people opposed to change. At least opposed to intellectual change. The Church was never against knowledge of the universe. Even before Galileo's time the Pope had his own astronomers. (At the last Worldcon I heard an astronomer from the Vatican Observatory. I hadn�t known it existed, but it goes back beyond Galileo's time.) But when Galileo suggested that the universe did not behave as it had been thought to through the previous history, then Galileo was in trouble with the Church. God apparently wanted us to have knowledge but was opposed to changing the interpretation of that knowledge. There is a very natural fear of change universally. People do not like the unexpected. They project this prejudice onto their god. God is believed to be opposed to all scientific change. I find that very hard to accept.
We see the religious fear of change in current politics. This was not a new argument with stem cell research. Ministers in the Americas blamed the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake on God's wrath over the invention of the lightning rod. This was seen as a device that turned aside His righteous lightning. There were strong religious protests over the introduction of vaccination to fight disease for very similar reasons. Disease was supposedly God's tool to use as He saw fit. It was considered by many to be wrong to resist diseases in this way. And again if A was vaccinating B, C was against it because he was afraid that he--C--would be punished. That argument is actually still with us. There are religious protests against doing AIDS research by religious people who believe that AIDS is God's vengeance against homosexuals and hence curing AIDS is against God's Will..
Hanns Heinz Ewers's novel ALRAUNE is about a beautiful woman who at the same time is a soulless monster intentionally bringing ruin and destruction to all who know her. And how did she become a soulless monster? Her birth was the result of an artificial insemination, and hence it broke God's laws. This story was done as a film no less than four times, once as recently as 1952.
I think today we recognize that artificial insemination is no more playing God than is vaccination or putting up a lightning rod. That is not what we mean by playing God. Though I am not sure there is a common definition as to what playing God is. I do not think it is something that can be done in a science laboratory. Playing God was motioning left or right with a riding crop to new arrivals at Auschwitz Concentration Camp. And there was nothing very scientific about that.
So do I have no fears for this brave new world of scientific knowledge? Well, not for the knowledge itself, but the empowerment the knowledge brings scares me a great deal. This is an age of empowerment when individuals or small groups can achieve a lot more than even governments could even two decades ago. Private enterprise is now putting rockets into space and selling passenger space for tourism.
SpaceShipOne shows that individuals with a little capital can go into space. That feels pretty good until I start thinking of SpaceShipOne and El Qaeda in the same thought. Suddenly I am not so sure I want so much empowerment. Certainly I do not like universal distribution of empowerment. Universal empowerment was what the Krell of FORBIDDEN PLANET provided their people. It turned out to be a fatal mistake. And we are approaching a time when individuals or small groups will be able to wage nuclear or chemical or biological war. I do not know if we were meant to have such power or not meant to, but I do fear for when it happens.
Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 2005 Mark R. Leeper 
|
|
