Episode Report Card Jacob: A+ | 562 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT There's Beauty In The Breakdown
By Jacob | Season 4 | Episode 4 | Aired on April 25, 2008
I believe that redemption is primarily the process by which we recognize we are already redeemed. I believe that only a God who could love even Gaius Baltar is a God worth serving, and the only God worth emulating.
I think that denying Gaius Baltar, or anybody else, a measure of salvation is grossly inappropriate: if he feels connected to that spark for even one second, we can be jealous, but trying to take it away from him just hurts us. I think you have to look in the grossest, sweatiest, scariest angriest places to tease out any piece of God at all.
I believe that a God worth serving, or loving, would laugh and smack you on the head if you even asked, because it's already done. I cannot believe that our bullshit is God's problem; your duty to grow is to yourself and you've got all the tools you need anyway. God sends a helicopter and a submarine and a lifeboat and a superhero, the last thing God wants to hear is that you're waiting for God to save you.
I believe that growth and strength and mercy and forgiveness and kindness are duties to ourselves, but not necessarily to God. I believe that only in fearless self-examination can we find understanding of others, much less the capability of loving them.
I believe that loving everyone that exists with the whole of your heart is the endgame; by recognizing that spark in them, but also by simply being able to acknowledge the inherent beauty in the fact that they exist at all.
I think to say, and leave it at, "Cylons/Tory/Cain are crazy/evil" or "Cally is worthless trash" or "Michael Angeli is a scumbag" is a really good indication of the areas of our blindness. Our hate, and what enrages it, tell us where we're small.
I believe everything that breaks comes from the things we don't acknowledge, not the things we do. I believe that everything that rises must converge, that every act of kindness or selflessness is a testament to God.
I believe that "perfection" is a loaded concept, because it can be made to imply exclusion: "never broken" is a very different proposition from "finally fixed," and fairly useless in this context. I'd be satisfied with "better." I don't believe I've ever met an evil person, in real life or on this show.
I think the people that love us are only capable of shining what was already there, but you can trust the people that hurt us to burn off the crap, if we let it. And I believe that our world, and ourselves, only get larger when we burn off what doesn't work. And someday it'll hold us all.