Further thoughts on The God Complex

[kerravonsen]

I said in my previous post that The God Complex wasn't one of those atheistic all-religion-is-evil diatribes in the guise of an episode. But thanks to this excellent post by kaffyr, I've since changed my mind: it was an anti-religious episode, but done with much more subtlety than they usually are.

There are a few things that the episode is saying:
1. All faith is blind faith, or in the words of Roj Blake: "Faith? Defined as believing in things you know aren't true."
2. Faith is irrational, and all irrational beliefs are equivalent.
3. Therefore changing someone's faith from one object to another object is trivial.
4. Even if that object is going to kill you.
5. Therefore all faith leads to death; faith == death.

And that conclusion is simply abominable.

Part of the reason this didn't come across as anvilicious is that Rita defies the stereotypes; she's obviously intelligent, sharp, and not gullible. She doesn't have faith in the Doctor, she doesn't fall into line with the "don't worry, he'll save us" faith that Amy is preaching. And yet Rita has to die anyway.

The other anomaly is Gibbis; presumably he has "faith" in something or he would never have been kidnapped by the ship. And yet he isn't killed. Why?
One theory I've seen expressed in discussion is that Gibbis has faith in anything that will allow him to survive, and his faith is so fickle, constantly changing, that the system wasn't able to get a fix on it in order to take it over.
I'm not sure what that is supposed to say about "faith".

Addendum: I've had second thoughts on Gibbis. I think he was in fact the first person to "lose his faith"; not because he had faith in anything, but because his unwavering credo was this: if you surrender, they won't kill you. And that faith was brutally destroyed by the example of the deaths of the others, because in that situation, if you surrender, the monster WILL kill you.


ETA: Another good post on this subject by the_arc5 (thanks, dreamflower!).

Comments

[vilakins]

I didn't like it either, for the same reasons.

[dreamflower]

the_arc5 also has an excellent post on the subject.

The main problem here is that the underlying premise of the episode (and this is not unique to Doctor Who; many sci-fi shows seem to hold that premise) is that "faith=religion=superstition" and that it is an emotion that the human race must evolve out of in order to advance.

The premise is broken because these writers have a screwed-up definition of faith. They think of faith as a feeling of devotion. But that's not what faith is. Faith is not emotion, faith is belief. Belief is NOT a feeling.

Faith does not equal religion. The average person has faith that flipping that little switch by the door with turn on and off the light. The average person may understand very little about how or why that electricity is delivered to the light bulb by way of the switch. But if they decided that they no longer believed it, it still would not affect the light. The electricity is still a fact, whether it's believed or not. And it has nothing to do with religion.

Religion does not equal superstition, either. Superstition is the notion that by doing certain things certain ways you can affect whether the world treats you well. Some superstitions are common: belief in a lucky rabbit's foot or in avoiding black cats are common, but most of us have little private superstitions shared with no one. Religion doesn't tell us that our rituals or our prayers can MAKE our Deity do anything, though a few people act as though they do.

And faith is not a useless little vestigial organ like an appendix, something we have to cut out lest it fester. Faith is an important part of the human condition, and we remove it at our peril.

[kerravonsen]

And faith is not a useless little vestigial organ like an appendix, something we have to cut out lest it fester. Faith is an important part of the human condition, and we remove it at our peril.

Indeed.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

There are a few things that the episode is saying

I don't think that the writer was thinking about it deeply enough to be consciously trying to say any of those things. He just wanted a Plot Device. It's true that had he been a believer in any religion himself he would have been unlikelyt to come up with that particular device.

[brendanpodger.livejournal.com]

While in this case "5. Therefore all faith leads to death; faith == death." the Doctor is quite happy for people to have faith and encourages it's use as a baulwark against despair.

Just think of what a strong and pervasive force it must be in the Doctor's universe if a race of creatures can evolve with the ability to feed off it.