Yet we never see Uhura or McCoy go to church. They don't ever have any specific opinions on abortion or gay rights or really show they even worship a God. Just knowing a BIble verse is hardly all it takes to be Christian. I know a few and I have no interest in being part of a religion. A show like Trek will always sort of just skim the surface of earth culture because it's hard to even nail down what life is like on earth in the 23rd or 24th century.
The Enterprise has a chapel (or at least a room that occasionally functions as a chapel). I recommend a rewatch of "Bread and Circuses" - it's more than obvious that Uhura is Christian. There are numerous instances in both the TV series and the movies in which McCoy expresses his religious views.
As for abortion and gay rights, you should realize that back in the '60s, these are not things that were ever discussed in TV series - certainly not in anything that was considered "family-friendly." They wouldn't allow the original ending of "Who Mourns for Adonais" to stand because Carolyn Palamas turns out to be pregnant by Apollo. Remember that this was the era in which most TV shows depicted married couples sleeping in twin beds. So you are not going to find the TOS characters discussing abortion or gay rights.
I'm guessing most have gone down the aithest route
It would be appreciated if you would spell this word correctly: atheist.
They have all evolved into Roddenberry humans, wear the same kinds of clothes all seem to embrace either technology or retro stuff. Only in Trek would people sit around listening to classical music like it's the 1780's and then go to some room and starting spouting technobabble with each other.
I sit around reading Shakespeare like it's the 16th century and then boot up my laptop and go online. I don't see the problem if the TNG characters have an obsession with classical music, and it's fun when Tom Paris gets into his 20th century hobbies. They play futuristic sports and have the holodeck to design pretty much any kind of recreational setting they want.
Also their doesn't seem to be much modern art. People write books but most of the holodeck programs seem to be always built around past settings. No movies or tv. The little modern music we have seen is awful. They do seem to still like sports. It is a very conservative world they seem to live in only they have simply removed the religious stuff and sort of transfered some of the racism towards alien cultures but even they are in denial about that.
Voyager had movie night on the holodeck, and B'Elanna built Tom a 1950s-style TV set (albeit with a remote control and the shows were downloaded from Voyager's library database).
"They just assumed the audience is too stupid." That my friend, is an assumption in itself, and an unfair one as it fails to give the benefit of the doubt.
You are in no position to cast judgments.
It's an entirely justified assumption, given the words of a studio executive when objections were raised to using ancient Mayan aliens in TMP. The executive shrugged and said, "The audience will never know the difference."
Some of us do know the difference. It still annoys me when I do a rewatch of one of the Fifth Doctor stories (Four to Doomsday) in which the Doctor states that the Mayans "lived 8000 years ago in South America."
That's total BS. They were never in South America, and from the reference point of the 20th century (when that story was set), they most assuredly did not live 8000 years ago.
The more anthropology I took in high school and college, the less I was able to suspend my disbelief when SF series went the "ancient aliens" route and trotted out all this crap about the Egyptians, Mayans, and others really being aliens. It feeds into the nonsense that humans couldn't really have built the Pyramids or Stonehenge.
Hollywood is guilty of a hell of a lot of "these people are unfamiliar to most of the audience, so they will never know the difference if we go the route of mysticism and make up anything we want." That's what I mean by assuming the audience is stupid.
