Many of you were too busy struggling to survive this past decade to watch one of our decades defining moment unfold on, of all places, the Sci Fi Channel.

It’s over now. But from the perspective of this season’s finale, when looking back, social historians will divide this decade into two phases… The Lord of the Rings phase, which influenced the first half of this decade, and the Battlestar Galactica, which will influence the first half of the next ten years…

There is a difference in the mediums… The cinema forces hoopla to be compressed into a tight schedule… The medium of television, allows the showings to have less influence upon their initial showings, but… continue playing over and over for a long period of time…

As an example, the series Star Trek II was not watched by large numbers of viewers during its initial showings, but accumulated fans by its late night showings of its reruns… But the social philosophy of the nineties decade, is remarkably similar to that which emanated out of the series: show tolerance, people are different, all can work together for a common goal, as well as it is our duty to make other’s lives better….

It is not that the series directly touched millions of viewers. It is that those viewers it touched, were influential enough so that what they then wrote, what they were able to accomplish, what they said, went on to mold part of our core as well..

Now looking back in retrospect, we can see how the Lord of the Rings trilogy gave us clues into humanity’s development of character…. Battlestar Galactica, illustrates our future.

If I could pinpoint the essence of both these works, I would have to say that both boil down to this premise: that there has to be some form of destiny at work in all things… That each independent individual action taking place in what looks like on the local scale, to be a random action, is in truth, some small part of some overall plan…

We are reminded of this in Lord of the Rings, where it is actually the odious Gollum who saves the universe, instead of our noble hero whose arduous burden we bore over three years, who at the bitter end succumbs to moral failure, and comes seconds away from eliminating “good” from the universe.

Suddenly all those moments throughout the three episodes involving that odious character, are seen in new light… A force, a destiny perhaps, that chain of events leading up to that surprising conclusion, instead of being a sideline to the main plot… are in truth the real story; and those of us blindly following the narrative, were fooled and simply did not know it…

Likewise in Battlestar Galactica, a strange series of events, signs, prophecies, unexplainables, conflict, death and destruction, all occur to one end… and that end … at least to those of us still inhabiting this warm planet, leads us to the most important thing in the universe.. ourselves..

How then could a song on a piano, taught by a loving dad to his little girl, change the course of destiny… Well, if you watched… you already know…

If you didn’t, or refuse to… you will eventually come around to understanding it, as the rest of us today who are now setting up society’s frames of thinking for the next ten years… begin espousing it.

For me, the final episode crystallizes ones life’s journey spent investigating the influence of external forces on internal matters… They came up with these words…

How do you know that God is on your side, doctor?

I don’t. God’s not on any one side. God’s a force of nature, beyond good and evil. Good and evil, we created those. Want to break the cycle? Break the cycle of birth, death, rebirth, destruction, escape, death. Well, that’s in our hands, and our hands only. It requires a leap of faith. It requires that we live in hope, not fear.

That last line boils down to why man needs God. And why there will always be God, as long as there is man…

The futileness of our lives, can be summed up in this simple phrase…”what difference do we make?”
Really, what difference do we make?

Personally as I look at my children, my spouse, my dear friends, my lovers in past lives (lol), and I can acknowledge I have made a rich, but small difference… In “It’s A Wonderful Life” we are ultimately reminded of how different the world would be were we not continually engaged in being ourselves…

But if I were not here, wouldn’t someone different have taken my place?

Wouldn’t the same events transfold, perhaps not on a small scale, but wouldn’t the larger picture remain the same?

Ah… the unsolvable argument…. Bottom line? We never, ever get the chance to know…

And that is why we have this deeply ingrained need to believe lives matter.. And some of us, yes, will obstinately persist to think otherwise. But were they to do so, the irony still exists that somewhere in their progeny, again this same thought or belief will be reborn… for to us, …our lives matter very much indeed… Believing they are part of a greater purpose, does just that.

Others may say that this theory actually disproves God’s existence.. They argue that if we believe in him, simply because WE need to, then he doesn’t exist at all, we are in essence just creating him. They argue our weakness is what brings us to that conclusion; that with purity of thought, all argument disproves his existence entirely…

To statements like this, I smile… They mean little.. Purity of thought. Who cares?

For what actually happens is that over the long existence of mankind’s history, we always return to God.. We may stray for centuries, but no matter what random forces batter or impact us, eventually we return… Our need for religion is not our weakness. It is our nature…

And that is where this phrase plays big… God is not good or bad. He is a force of nature…

For as long as there is one person alive who believes and creates the argument that God exists, that our actions are part of a larger purpose, …. like it or not, God is playing a role in our thought processes, and by extension, therefore our lives…

And if he is playing a role in our lives… how then can he not exist?

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