As for other contenders for Worst TNG Moment, just gonna throw this out there... the blatant anti-religion message of "Who Watches the Watchers?". The episode itself is good, and, in-universe, it's not too overt. (Although Picard's speech equating belief in a higher power with the supernatural and dark ages of superstition and fear pushes it. It also seems out of character for him.)
But in an out-of-universe/real-world context, the episode is very anti-religious belief, which is surprising and disappointing, imho, for a franchise that usually makes such strong statements about infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Well naturally, as an athiest, I thought Picard was dead on in his points, and I couldn't help but admire the bravery of the writers taking on the subject. The episode does a great job showing just how easily people can get sucked into believing in the supernatural (or higher power, same diff
), and how hard it is to get them to stop once they've begun.
I DO agree the execution could have been a bit less preachy and heavy-handed though, and Picard probably got a little more angry and judgmental than he should have.
As a believer in freedom of speech, I loved "Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" (I know the title was in english - but it should've been in latin); challenging christian censorship in one of its biggest strongholds (Hollywood) demands respect.
You both make very good points about challenging the establishment in Hollywood; I hadn't thought of it like that before. Still,
davejames, your point about the execution serves my point as well: I don't think it does anyone any good to be preaching squarely on either side of the issue. The issue of religious belief (which is really what the episode was about, not religious institutions) is simply more complicated than that.
The criticisms of Who Watches the Watchers as being anti-religious are, frankly, a total furphy.
You give no evidence beyond your own take on religion (which isn't evidence, but interpretation) to support this claim. Unless I'm misunderstanding the term "furphy"?
My own take is religion is by definition supernatural and at its worst excesses unapologetically so. And you can’t have it both ways. You can’t argue religious dogma in the face of overwhelming evidence and reason across the whole gamut of science and social issues and then cry foul when you’re labelled superstitious.
Not to be unkind, but you don't know what you're talking about here. Religion ≠ religious dogma ≠ religious institutions ≠ religious belief.
A brief rundown:
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Religion is the general term that encompasses a whole range of different systems of beliefs and morals/ethics. "Religion" covers everything from fundamentalist Protestantism to various schools of Buddhist thought, from Unitarian Universalists to Sunni Islam, from paganism to Hinduism to Taoism to Rastafarianism. If you're going to make assertions about "religion," you'd better have a lot of evidence to back it up, because there is a whole hell of a lot that falls under the term "religion."
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Religious institutions are bodies that claim to represent their faith's organization on Earth. Some institutions are basically in-line with what most of their parishioners believe (many Protestant denominations are like this; if a parishioner doesn't agree with the theology, they leave and join another denomination). Other institutions are not (for example, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forbids the use of birth control, but there are plenty of practicing Catholics who go ahead and use it anyway). Some religions have rigid, be-all-end-all institutions (again, the RCC), while others have less powerful institutions (again, many Protestant denominations). Most faiths have some organization, even if it is very loosely organized and/or not necessarily representative of its members.
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Religious dogma, or often,
doctrine, refers to a faith's teachings. The ability of a faith's followers to dispute doctrine has been the crux of many, many disagreements over the millenia. (For example, there was a little thing called the Protestant Reformation a few hundred years ago.) More rigid religious institutions tend to declare doctrine the way governments declare laws: no wiggle room. But many religious institutions articulate doctrines and then discuss them and allow them to evolve as time goes on. Doctrines include the Ten Commandments and various iterations of the Golden Rule, but also include things like Kosher dietary laws, none of which actually rely on a belief in the supernatural. (Caveat: I'm a little rusty on my Kosher laws, but regardless of whether or not they are framed in some supernatural context, you can follow the doctrine of Kosher without believing in anything supernatural.)
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Religious belief reflects an individual's choice of which doctrines to follow, as well as whatever they conclude on their own.
And just to inject some perspective into the discussion, some of our greatest leaders, reformers and minds have believed in a higher power (even if they weren't associated with, or even in fact vocally disagreed with a particular religious institution):
-Ben Franklin
-Albert Einstein
-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
-Mohandas Gandhi
-Archbishop Desmond Tutu
According to Memory Alpha, Picard says:
Millennia ago, they [the Mintakans] abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear [by telling them that I am their God]? No!
The logic of the episode is that a rekindling of Mintakan theistic religion would send them back into "the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear." That is a simplistic view of religion that does a disservice to the discourse on the role of religion in a progressive society.
The episode does, of course, make very good points about those who use faith as an excuse to abandon
all reason and act irrationally. But there are many, many, many religious folks out there who do not behave this way. The episode doesn't allow for a reasonable coexistence of faith and rationality (which you clearly see in Franklin, Einstein and Dr. King, among many others).
Tulaberry whine, I'm sorry to be jumping down your throat, but I just don't think you can be so dismissive of "religion"; the fact is that there are way more religious people than non-religious people, and if you go and make statements like you did in your last post, you're just gonna alienate the people on the other side more. And that can't be a good thing.
I apologize for derailing the thread, everyone.
Moving on, I second the nomination of "Sub Rosa," but particularly when Crusher's grandmother pops out of the coffin. That was the first episode of TNG my (very young at the time) sister ever saw, and it suffices to say that it took her years to recover from it and actually like a TNG episode!
