No Fate But What We Make

(This was originally a Facebook post from Dec 2012)

I was watching Terminator 2 on AMC when I suddenly remember a conversation I had with my dad after seeing it for the first time. I must have been 8 years old. We spent a lot of time in our yards when I was a little kid. Mom was always planting flowers and me and my Dad were always doing the manly things (Roar roar roar).

We had just seen the movie a few weeks earlier. Being an 8 year old boy the heroic, violent, story stuck with me. As my Dad passed me a dust pan to go sweep the driveway I asked him, "Could Terminators really take over the world?"

"No." He said, "God wouldn't allow it."

"Why not?"

"Because God loves us and would never let something so evil happen."

I returned to the yard unsatisfied with the answer. A person had dreamed the idea, the movie, and someone built a semi functioning Endoskeleton for the future war scenes. The only thing missing was the thinking computer chip welded into its head.

It then suddenly dawned on me that people didn't need self aware computers to kill humans on massive scales. We had been doing it ourselves since the dawn of time. That meant all you needed to have Robots take over the world was a person to think it, a person to built it and one to drive it.

That day in the front yard I independently came to the conclusion that if the world were to come to and end it wouldn't be by God's will but by Mans... There was Evil in the Machine but the greater capacity for Evil was in us.

The thought haunted me for days and kept giving me nightmares. Eventually I came to the conclusion that if there was that type of evil in the world then there must be the same amount of good... But what good could stop something something like that?

It wasn't until Chris and I started writing that I finally had an answer... I guess I was more imaginative than Mr. James Cameron because one of our heroes had a Jet pack and a Space Fighter... ;)