Dr. Forbush Thinks

Another Guide

Now that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has made a temporary jump from geek culture to mainstream culture with the release of the movie I'll discuss the religious aspect of the movie. The book, TV and radio have all had a chance to influence our society with this obscure science fiction. But, what made Douglas Adam's work separate from other science fiction is that he didn't take himself serious but he raised serious questions.

In fact, it's a bit surprising that the Fundamentalist Christians aren't jumping up and down protesting this movie. After all it challenges the fundamental idea that God created us for a purpose. This whole series of stories is based on the idea that earth is a tiny bit of the entire universe. In fact the Earth itself is a bio-computer, which was programmed to solve a problem. The solution to the problem is heralded in geek circles as the meaning of life, and its answer is 42. Of course the problem the bio-computer Earth was asked to solve was finally discovered to be 6 X 9. Most people should recognize that the solution actually doesn't match the problem, unless you are calculating it in base 13.

The whole point of this little story is to point out that our life on Earth could really be pointless.

But the thing that Fundamentalist Christians would surely be upset about if they thought about this is that the premise of the story is that there is a book that guides us through all the problems in the Galaxy. It is an enormous book containing more than a million pages, but it is contained in a little PDA. This is obviously a thinly veiled jab at the book that Christians tend to wave in everyone's face proclaiming truth. The point Douglas Adams is trying to make here is that if there really were a book that had all the answers in it what would it be like. The answer is nothing at all like the Bible.

Douglas Adams continues to slam culture and religion throughout this story in so many situations and ways that it is hard to imagine how a 2 hour movie could be made out of all this material. But, on the other hand, weeding everything except the essential premise out of the movie make it accessible to the short attention span general population who may not think much about its attack on religion.

Douglas Adams asks all the important questions surrounding human existence on this planet in this galaxy. His irreverent answers offer those who are willing to listen an alternative explanation to many of these questions. But, everyone can always say that those answers are truly wrong, because we know that they have never been proven correct. However, instead of simply being a silly story of impossibility it becomes a story of hope.

Hope is a feeling that is the opposite of despair. To look around the world and see people fighting and killing each other over religion and ideology most people feel despair. The reaction of many people is to ignore the world and find another place away from the world to put effort and energy. But, this reaction is like putting ones head in the sand. Douglas Adams manages to proclaim all religion pointless and offer hope that there really is a plan beyond this Earth. It may be just as silly as the religions of the world, but at least it will be the truth.