"No Silicon Heaven? Then where do all the calculators go?"

[eye_of_a_cat]

(I'm sure all of this will get completely contradicted in the next episode I see, but humour me for now.)

Red Dwarf, which for all its genius is not usually a helpful source for speculation on serious sci-fi, had a universe with sentient machines (including toasters) who were programmed with a belief in an afterlife so they wouldn't all start thinking it was pointless to serve humanity. (There's also a Silicon Hell full of photocopiers.) Obviously they didn't embrace that religion and then stage a rebellion anyway, because it's a sitcom, but, still...

Anyway. The Cylons think - or at least that particular Cylon thinks - that they're sent by God and that their genocide was God's punishment for humanity's sins since even before the Cylons came along, which makes a weird kind of sense, but it's not really a radical-fundamentalist-wipe-out-the-infidel kind of sense. If they just wanted to kill all the people who didn't believe the way they did, why wouldn't they kill Helo and destroy the fleet (or at least do a lot more damage than they're doing right now), and why would they bother with telling humans that God loved them and had a plan for them and just wanted them to repent? It might make sense if they were still fighting a war, but they've effectively won it now. But their behaviour's never about the Cylons, and even their plan doesn't seem to be about the Cylons, or at least not exclusively - it's about humans, and what they're going to do with humans, and what they want from humans, and what humans should be thinking and believing.

I think the genocide-as-God's-punishment idea doesn't fit with that idea, and I think the reason it sounded strange (at least, to me) was because we're not used to hearing it from that point of view - usually it's 'that plague or natural disaster or famine or whatever was God's punishment to us, because we messed up and we should start being sorry right now'. Sometimes, although I don't think as often, it's about other people getting punished for something specific they've done, but even then it's about what was done wrong and the people who did it. If you're saying that an earthquake wiped out such-and-such a town because they were doing however many things wrong, then your explanation is about those people and that town, not really about the earthquake. The earthquake just happened to be the way it happened; it's a tool, it's not the important thing.

The Cylons might see themselves as the next evolutionary step from humans, or the only people God's still happy with, but their actions aren't about replacing human society with a Cylon one or discarding humans as outmoded or rejected. They're really interested in humans. And that makes sense, because saying they're sent by God as punishment for humanity means that really, humanity is what's important here. Cylons are just the tool. So their behaviour around humans isn't motivated by scientific curiosity - they don't want to learn about humans, they want humans to learn. (In that sense, the Cylon in 'Flesh and Bone' wasn't there to investigate what was going to happen to humanity on a species level, and actually just wanted to know what Starbuck and Laura Roslin would do. Or lead them towards doing the right thing. Either way, I think he would have evaluated their actions to him as individual actions and not as justifiable/non-justifiable in terms of the greater good; Cylons aren't bothered by genocide and don't think death is all that permanent, after all.)

If the Cylons were created to serve humanity, and the Cylon religion was first intended as a way to justify why they should be doing it, then I think it does make a lot of sense that even now they'd be viewing themselves as instruments (however favoured by God those instruments are) and humanity, on whatever level, as the important thing. And my sympathies are probably being misplaced here anyway, but at any rate, I think this is one of the reasons I'm as interested in them as I am in the humans.