Monday, May 16, 2005
Jimmy Akin on Religion & Star Trek
It'd be nice to get Blair's opinion on this thing. Anyone?
Roddenberry was thus suitably enraged when Bill Shatner got to incorporate an explicitly God-oriented (and braindead) plot in Star Trek V: The Search for God (or whatever it was called).
Things got worse when Roddenberry got to do Next Gen, in which he had far fewer shackles on his secular humanism compared to what he was allowed to put on television in the 1960s. Not only were the episodes in which Picard gleefully proclaimed that humans are merely electro-chemical machines, there was also the awful "Who Watches The Watchers" episode in which the ship finds a planet of primitive proto-Vulcans and accidentally starts a religion among them, leading to a prime-directive violation in order to stamp it out. Secular humanism is in full force in this episode, and religion is treated very disrespectfully.
Roddenberry's secular humanism was one of several dumb things he imposed on the series. The idea that the Federation was a paradise and didn't have money were others.
But this wasn't the end of the story.
Roddenberry died, and afterward the franchise passed into other hands. These folks, whatever their flaws, tried to undo some of the conceptual damage that Roddenberry had done and loosened the ideological straightjacket into which he had put certain elements of the show.
The franchise then got more friendly toward religion. In fact, the next two series--Deep Space 9 and Voyager--both contain episodes that are extensively devoted to and positive about religious themes.
Deep Space 9 has three major religions in focus: Bajoran religion, Dominion religion, and Klingon religion. It never proclaims any of them true (and in fact, it's quite clear that the Dominion religion is false), but it offers the show extensive changes to discuss things like the value of faith, the role of evidence for faith, what the prerogatives of God are, how one may need to sacrifice personal power and prestige in order to embrace true spirituality, how seeminly unconnected events can be part of a divine plan, how the loss of faith and the betrayal of faith are bad things.
There's one moment in a DS9 episode in which the Kai (the main Bajoran religious leader) discovers that someone close to her has embraced the Bajoran equivalent of Satanism and, stunned, her instant reaction si to slap him very hard and cry "Heretic!"--and the thing is, you agree with her! He is a heretic! He needs to be slapped! The Kai (for once) did the right thing.
Roddenberry was thus suitably enraged when Bill Shatner got to incorporate an explicitly God-oriented (and braindead) plot in Star Trek V: The Search for God (or whatever it was called).
Things got worse when Roddenberry got to do Next Gen, in which he had far fewer shackles on his secular humanism compared to what he was allowed to put on television in the 1960s. Not only were the episodes in which Picard gleefully proclaimed that humans are merely electro-chemical machines, there was also the awful "Who Watches The Watchers" episode in which the ship finds a planet of primitive proto-Vulcans and accidentally starts a religion among them, leading to a prime-directive violation in order to stamp it out. Secular humanism is in full force in this episode, and religion is treated very disrespectfully.
Roddenberry's secular humanism was one of several dumb things he imposed on the series. The idea that the Federation was a paradise and didn't have money were others.
But this wasn't the end of the story.
Roddenberry died, and afterward the franchise passed into other hands. These folks, whatever their flaws, tried to undo some of the conceptual damage that Roddenberry had done and loosened the ideological straightjacket into which he had put certain elements of the show.
The franchise then got more friendly toward religion. In fact, the next two series--Deep Space 9 and Voyager--both contain episodes that are extensively devoted to and positive about religious themes.
Deep Space 9 has three major religions in focus: Bajoran religion, Dominion religion, and Klingon religion. It never proclaims any of them true (and in fact, it's quite clear that the Dominion religion is false), but it offers the show extensive changes to discuss things like the value of faith, the role of evidence for faith, what the prerogatives of God are, how one may need to sacrifice personal power and prestige in order to embrace true spirituality, how seeminly unconnected events can be part of a divine plan, how the loss of faith and the betrayal of faith are bad things.
There's one moment in a DS9 episode in which the Kai (the main Bajoran religious leader) discovers that someone close to her has embraced the Bajoran equivalent of Satanism and, stunned, her instant reaction si to slap him very hard and cry "Heretic!"--and the thing is, you agree with her! He is a heretic! He needs to be slapped! The Kai (for once) did the right thing.
