The Doctrine of Firefly
A few years ago, there was a science fiction series on television called Firefly. It was highly entertaining, but the network quickly canceled it. It wasn’t perfect, but I won’t go into all of that. I do want to mention one episode, Jaynestown. The B plot of this episode has the characters River and Shepherd Book back on the ship. Shepherd is a preacher. River is a super smart woman who has been driven to near insanity by the government. She gets a hold of Shepherd’s Bible and decides that she is going to fix it. She starts tearing out pages as she goes because she finds things that she believes are incorrect, things like creation and the ark protecting the animals from the great flood. Shepherd tells her that the Bible doesn’t have to make sense because it is really just about believing in something. Later, she tells him that she is sorry that she tore the pages out of his symbol and she wants to put them back. Obviously, Shepherd is not a good preacher. Rather than showing ...