Religion and Star Trek
- Thread starter VulcanMindBlown
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Discussing it is a bit different than forcing it on people and Christians have a pretty poor track record of only wanting to "discuss" their religion.
If that was a response to my post, then: SWOOOOSH!
Not sure what you're referring to, but SF has engaged with religious themes and concepts since the very beginning, albeit not always in conventional or doctrinaire ways. See H.G. Wells, C.S. Lewis, Olaf Stapledon, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish, Larry Niven, Michael Bishop, Gene Wolfe, James Morrow, etc.
Hell, one of Heinlein's final books was an irreverent take on The Book of Job . . . .
One of my favorite novels is "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock
No, Billj's post.
The same could be said of secularism.
What would be the future alternative? Are you going to provide future space/star explorers with a list of forbidden subjects, will they be instructed to basically lie to other species (an activity that could come back and sting us).
And how would that work when millions (hundreds of millions?) of Human civilians spread out among the stars? Are you going to quarantine people on Earth unless they sign a non-disclosure form.
And then there's going to be aliens on Earth interacting with the general population at some point.
Interstellar colonists are going to want to include religious leaders within their communities. Depending on the size of the group, I would certainly want at least one priest in my colony group.
I've never had a secularist knock on my door and want to talk to me about their beliefs. Nor have LGBT people, Jews and many other folks.
I guess every group needs a storyteller.
If aliens showed up tomorrow I don't know if any Christian will feel the need to go knock on their spaceship door. I can't speak for other religions but as far as Christianity is concerned it is about the redemption of 'humanity', not other sentient species. If there is a spiritual path for the others I'm sure it's been taken care of in a way that is most suited for them.
The Cherokees are mostly Christian today but it's not because they were forced. The early missionaries lived with them, learned their language, became part of the tribe, went to jail for them and some traveled on the Trail of Tears with them. They...you know...acted like Jesus. There is also the fact that the Cherokees were already monotheistic and a mystical personage who was able to travel from this world to the next (ok..in their stories he was a wolf). Some believe they even had a version of the Trinity. They were easily converted without much fanfare. However at the same time, many held onto the traditional beliefs and were not censored for it. There are many who still practice them today. I acknowledge that this is an exception.
The Cherokees are mostly Christian today but it's not because they were forced. The early missionaries lived with them, learned their language, became part of the tribe, went to jail for them and some traveled on the Trail of Tears with them. They...you know...acted like Jesus. There is also the fact that the Cherokees were already monotheistic and a mystical personage who was able to travel from this world to the next (ok..in their stories he was a wolf). Some believe they even had a version of the Trinity. They were easily converted without much fanfare. However at the same time, many held onto the traditional beliefs and were not censored for it. There are many who still practice them today. I acknowledge that this is an exception.
And yet I've had (surprising even to me) multiple christians tell me that if there were other alien races out there that jesus would have had to go there and die for them too. They were opposed to this idea because apparently god only made the Earth.
Plugging dead jesuses into the drake equation afterwards was somewhat amusing, but they didn't think so.
I've heard this too but mostly among a certain subset of fundamentalist American Christians. I highly doubt mainstream believers would agree.
How do we know that Jesus hasn't been real busy out there in the last 2000 years? It's not like we've been getting updates to the Bible.
Jesus has been on sabbatical on Risa.
Burning Bush- the app? That's the only way I can imagine it working now. Gods experiment with facebook has gone pretty well so far, time for an app.
Atheism and especially materialism are world views or even philosophies but probably not religions.
To me the characters and general style of the franchise are very open-minded and tolerant, as are most of the fans, and so there should be a lot of room for new and different kinds of fans; part of the fun of having different beliefs and relating them to fiction, though, is trying to persuade others about them (attempting to persuade isn't discounting or ostracism).
While most of the characters seem to be non-religious, only Picard and Jake Sisko seemed fairly hostile to religion and both of those moments were pretty brief and atypical. I found it particularly interesting that Spock and McCoy thought of Genesis as fictional and yet felt it had some philosophical value and wisdom.
A more disturbing aspect is that some episodes, most directly "Dear Doctor," suggest that (because of or correlating with mass secularism?) humans will come to venerate and want to be deferential to a personified form of evolution.
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Damn. I forgot Moorcock.
And then, of course, there was "Good News from Vatican" by Robert Silverberg, which was about the first robot Pope. And how can we forget A Canticle for Lebowitz by Walter Miller? And we might also cite Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which deals explicitly with the creation of Life, specifically invoking Genesis (and Paradise Lost) at points:
"I was thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam, but rather am I the fallen angel whom you drivest from joy for no misdeed . . ."
And to bring this back to STAR TREK, let it be noted that James Blish, who wrote the first STAR TREK novelizations also wrote religiously-themed SF and fantasy novels such as, famously, A Case of Conscience and Black Easter. And that Richard Matheson, who wrote for TOS, expressed his personal theories about the afterlife in such books as What Dreams May Come and The Path, and that Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote both "Amok Time" and "Shore Leave" for TOS, explored the subject of religion in books like Venus Plus X.
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Someone mentioned Jake Sisko being negative about religion. When was this? Was it the episode where Kai Winn wanted to close down Keiko's school?
Jake was just a dumb kid then. His character hadn't developed much beyond being Ben Sisko's son.
But "out of the mouths of babes." I don't remember offhand exactly what he said, but it was likely meant to reflect the character's upbringing and education in that setting.
Most of my life my family and friends have all hated Star Trek. When I went to Church it was the first time I got to know any fellow Trekkie's. We are going as a Church group to see Star Trek Beyond and often share information which with each other about fan productions we have seen online. We all especially like Star Trek Continues.
Whilst Star Trek is secular, I think what Christian Trekkies tend to enjoy most is the morality plays that explore the human condition.
Whilst Star Trek is secular, I think what Christian Trekkies tend to enjoy most is the morality plays that explore the human condition.
As I recall, that was basically the take of that minister I debated years ago. He was certainly able to find Christian values (peace, sacrifice, forgiveness, etc.) in any number of classic STAR TREK episodes, even if they weren't specifically identified as such.
(And by "debated" I mean we had a friendly discussion in front of an audience.)
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