I am unashamedly a Red Dwarf fan so I was very happy to see the start of the 12th series. For those of you who have never heard of Red Dwarf (I suppose there may be someone) here is a potted history.
Dave Lister is a repair man on a spaceship. There is a radiation leak and 3 million years later he comes out of suspended animation to find that he is the only human to have survived.
For company Lister only has a hologram of his intolerable, ego centric ship mate Rimmer, the descendant of a cat which has evolved into something that looks like actor Danny John-Jules with vampire teeth, and an android who mops the floors called Kryten.
In the first episode the 'boyz' from the dwarf' receive some sort of distress call. They investigate and find a space station on some sort of moon or planet. Inside they revive a scientist whose lifework was to eradicate evil in mankind. He claims to have succeeded and as evidence points to his test subjects Hitler, Stalin, Vlad the Impaler and some equally horrible woman whose name I couldn't get.
He revives the above named test subjects who greet the 'boyz' with a smile. Of course they still have their old clothes on which for Hitler is Nazi uniform, that moustache and an inability to avoid giving Nazi salutes even when taking round the drinks.
After initial reservations the 'boyz' start to warm to what now appears to be four nice people. Hitler admits to a love of playing the guitar, which is just up Lister's street. Cue a madcap jamming session with Lister and Hitler doing the best, over the top, rock act since the Stones.
I was still chuckling about this a couple of days later as I drank my morning coffee in my local coffee shop. I must have been starting to wake up and a few brain cells commencing to fire as an idle thought crossed my sleepy brain.
The thought was one of those 'what if' thoughts that sometimes cross the minds of SF fans, even fans of comic spoofs such as Red Dwarf. The thought was
''What if it was possible to eradicate evil in mankind.'
Of course you would have to decide exactly what evil was, what caused it, if anything. Was it a 'thing', was it an action, could you learn it and unlearn it?
For the sake of argument let us assume that the scientist on that space station had cured the four subjects of being evil. This meant that Hitler could start again. He could go live in Berlin, rent an apartment, get a job, take his place in polite society. Wouldn't that be wonderful.
Now the caffeine must have been starting to work and a few more brain cells were starting to fire in my head as another idle thought came to mind. What about the Nazi death camps, the six million Jews killed as part of the 'final solution'. What about all the young men and women killed in the second world war largely at Hitler's cause. What would their families think if Hitler could now go free and live the remainder of his life whilst their loved ones had died. I expect that unhappy wouldn't even begin to describe how they would feel.
You see even in this hypothetical situation, with Hitler now cured of evil, he would still have been behind the death camps etc. Curing the problem going forward would not remove the guilt of the past.
Thankfully most of us do not have the legacy of Hitler, Stalin or Vlad the Impaler. However if we think that our pasts are unblemished then we delude ourselves. Our wrong doings, the bible calls them sins, may not be as great as Hitler's, but they are there and by ourselves we cannot remove them.
The bible teaches us that the wages of sin are death which means that all who have ever done wrong in the eyes of God will die. This means that we all deserve death.
If that were the end of the story then we would be a very sorry people with no hope. Yet that same God who says that sin deserves death provides a solution. His own Son would die in our place. He would take the punishment that is rightfully ours. Far from being a people of no hope we can become a people of true hope, hope for the future, and hope now.
Suddenly my coffee tasted just that little bit better.
