The Ark of Truth Alteran/Ancient Discussion thread

[Annubis' hitman]

Coopers saying a bunch of stuff about things in the movies so maybe he'll discuss the people in the village.

O and he talked about how morgan helping was like the ancients saying thank you for us kicking ori butt.

Read the article i think it was really cool.

[Tenth_Regent]

A couple things struck me about those scenes and what they imply. One is that the religion came first. It wasn't a deism imposed by the ascended Ori after their ascension; it was an established religion co-opted by them once ascended. (Actually, I'm sure the "imposition" part came later in that galaxy, after the Alteran ascension, in order to feed the Ori's desire for power.)

It seems then that it was the problem of a religious movement that the Ark was created to stem, rather like (if such science had existed) the Romans creating a brainwashing machine to fight off Christianity. (No, I'm not comparing Origin and Christianity; I'm merely drawing an historical allusion.) The Ark was meant to dissuade people -- human(oid)s -- from their religious beliefs. In such a context it seems odd that a race as enlightened as the Alterans would have even permitted such a device to be created. If we mere humans were able to conceive (and generally follow) the notions of the First Amendment, it seems the Alterans wouldn't have let things go as far as they did.

It all makes me wonder about the original version of Origin. Perhaps it was a Luddite response to the science in the Alteran culture. Obviously it would have been transformed over the ages to support the ascension mythos, but was it just an anti-science movement at the outset? Was that the danger and why it needed to be stopped, or was it something else? After the departure of the pro-science Alterans, an Origin-based Alteran culture probably developed, and after millennia of adherence, these people achieved ascension. So where did the “evil” part develop? At some point the Origin believers must have become corrupted in some manner: is this something they took with them into the enhanced state of ascencion? Or was manipulating a religion and forcing worship something they chose to do afterward – in essence, abandoning the teachings that permitted them to achieve ascencion to pursue their own greed of glorification and power?

As implied in the movie, Origin would likely be getting a re-write by its followers. But if the ascended Ori became the malicious creatures they were because of the original (or, over the ages, evolved) version of Origin that they followed, could the religion really be returned to whatever its original inspiration was? And would the followers accept such alterations, even if coming from the Doci and priors? People are rarely homogenous, and it seems that pockets of Origin crusades would continue for generations. The more I think about these things, the more I become convinced that SG1 will never again touch the Ori galaxy. Otherwise, they'd probably have to deal with some of the fallout from a radical change of the de facto state religion.