In the twenty-fourth century (per Penumbra) The Sisko wedding was to be performed by a priest.
Well, no. Sisko suggested having Admiral Ross perform their marriage, and Kassidy remarked that her mother would have preferred a
minister, but a Starfleet Admiral would be acceptable.
So there's a strong implication here that not only has Christianity survived, but that specifically some brand of Protestantism has survived.
Excellent list of indications that present-day Human religious traditions have survived into the Federation era, though!
Just pick your examples apart....
-Not sure about the 22nd century as I don't consider Enterprise series to be part of the rest of Star Trek.
Then you are cherry-picking which pieces of evidence you'll accept, which is a very unscientific way of going about supporting your thesis. The difference between science and religion is that science fits its hypothesis to support the evidence, not the evidence to fit the hypothesis.
-Sisko's wedding was going to be done by a minister. Ministers can be atheists. Michael Newdow,a relatively famous atheist, is a minister. The Humanist Society uses the term celebrant but thinks minister is acceptable.
Sure, but Atheist ministers are fairly rare. And earlier in that post, you all but dismissed the idea of religious Humanists by noting that they're fairly rare. So you're going to dismiss one relatively uncommon group but not another? Ocom's razor says it's more likely she was referring to a Protestant minister than an Atheist one.
-Chapel can be a place for anyone regardless of historical and present connotations of Christian place of worship.
Sure, but it's improbable there'd be a cross there if there were no religions left.
-"Bread and Circuses" seems to be the odd one out when it comes to religion. That line does make McCoy sound like an unflinching Christian without regard to the bloodshed done by the so called believers of love and brotherhood.
Presumably because McCoy is aware that an organization can hold a belief and fail to live up to it, and that the behavior of an organization's members does not automatically invalidate everything about their beliefs.
The United States government has killed many thousands of people for no reason -- Indian removal in the 19th Century, for instance, and the victims of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars in modern times. Yet no rational person would argue that its founding ethos -- an Enlightenment-originated belief in individual rights and liberty, including the Bill of Rights -- is invalidated because its members have violated them. People are, at the end of the day, flawed political actors, and organizations can never be any more morally pure than a person can. Institutions can be perverted by immoral political actors; that's true of the state, that's true of commerce, and that's true of religion. It's true of all aspects of life, and it doesn't render any particular kind of institution any more or less valid.
Then again he is a doctor, not a historian. Besides, it was shitty episode with Roman aliens that speak English and apparently going to have their version of dark ages, you know, the time after the Roman Empire fell, also when coincidentally Christianity spread.
No, Christianity spread for hundreds of years prior to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Christianity did not cause the Dark Ages, the tremendous social upheaval resulting from the fall of the Empire and the rise of Germanic powers did.
No lovely brotherhood existed in any majority Christian population.
No lovely brotherhood has ever existed in any majority-
anything population, because populations aren't good at lovely brotherhood, irrelevant of what their beliefs are. Lovely brotherhood does not prevail because
people are bad at it, not because Christians or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists or Zoroastrians or Muslims or Wiccans or whatever are bad at it.
It began before the first episode of TOS. You don't see it, it's just a fact of Gene Roddenberry's envisioned future.
Far be it for me to be skeptical of the Great Prophet Gene's Holy Vision, but bullshit.
Gene didn't have a fully-formed, worked-out "vision of the future." He had some basic Liberal/Progressive political beliefs that he used TOS to advance a bit (i.e., racial equality... as long as it was an Asian man driving and a black woman answering the space telephone), and then, later on, during the TOS-TNG interregnum, he started claiming that TOS was about showing a liberal utopia (clearly a revisionist nonsense claim) and used early TNG to get on a soapbox about various topics. But he never had any sort of fully worked-out Vision of the Future, and it certainly didn't exist at the beginning of TOS.
* * *
The idea that religion is inherently "bad" is bigoted nonsense. Religion is not inherently "bad." Irrational, yes -- it is, after all, based upon the presumption that the supernatural exists even when there is no evidence that it does. But not inherently bad, any more than any other kind of ideology is inherently bad. Religion is simply a belief system about the supernatural which prescribes a moral system for its adherents, which those adherents may then follow or not follow while still claiming allegiance to that religion. It is, in other words, just another institution, no different in moral character than the state, or the academy, or whatever.
If the world of
Star Trek is one in which we accept the idea of real diversity, of real equality, then we inherently must accept that there are going to be huge numbers of religious people. That's just life. These belief systems have been around thousands of years and they're not going away any time soon.
I'm sure that in the Federation, Judaism has survived, and Islam has survived, and Hinduism has survived, and Buddhism has survived, and Bahá'í has survived, and Jainism has survived, and Christianity has survived, and Sikhism has survived, and Wicca has survived, and... etc., etc., etc. And I'm sure that, unlike today, they all accept one-another as equals and recognize that no faith has a monopoly on morality over the others -- and I'm sure that's true of Atheists towards Theists, too.
