TIM O’NEILL: Cartoons and Fables – How Cosmos Got the Story of Bruno Wrong. “The objective here was to make a point about free thought and dogmatism in the context of the culture wars in the US about Creationism. That Bruno was a believer in God was an idea that was repeated several times in the cartoon, even though he was actually more of a pantheist than anything. But he is depicted as an open-minded and unconstrained believer who is oppressed and finally killed by the forces of dogmatic literalism. The cartoon Bruno’s cry to the fruit-throwing Oxford scholars – ‘Your God is too small!’ – is actually the point of the whole parable. This entire sequence was aimed at the dogmatic literalists in the American culture war while still trying to appeal to believers, given the majority of the show’s American audience would have been theists. That’s the framework of this fable and the writers chopped up bits of the actual historical Bruno story and then clumsily forced them into this modern message.”