If so, there's no mention of it here.
Roddenberry and the Biblical Allusions in TOS.
- Thread starter MakeshiftPython
- Start date
You don't have to be religious to appreciate the Bible as a work of literary and historical significance. As others have said, it was just part of people's education, a shared cultural referent whether you were a churchgoer or not. It's just one more part of the Western canon that Trek's writers drew on, along with Shakespeare, Milton, and Lewis Carroll.
I think you're reading too much into it. The idea of aliens looking demonic or satanic had been around in popular culture for a while -- Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End from 1953 is a prominent example. It's just playing on the idea of aliens looking scary or monstrous before we get to know them. To some extent, also, it's because cultural depictions of aliens descend from traditional depictions of other nonhuman creatures in folklore like fairies and imps. That's where the idea of inhuman creatures with pointed ears came from, since pointed ears are found in animals but not humans.
So Roddenberry probably wasn't making some religiously charged statement -- he was just doing what he did to create most of Star Trek, adopting a pre-existing idea from science fiction and pop culture. He wasn't an innovator so much as a distiller and popularizer.
Exactly. The idea of Roddenberry as a philosopher was more of a later development, when he started to believe his own image in fandom. In the '60s, he may have wanted to tell thoughtful stories with social commentary, but mainly he was just a TV producer trying to make something that would please audiences and critics. So he used whatever ideas and tropes he thought would achieve that. I even once saw a quote from Roddenberry in a fanzine to the effect that having a message is less important than being entertaining, because it doesn't matter what your message is if the audience isn't interested enough to stick around and hear it.
That's certainly how it used to be.
"Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech, that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible; don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon."
Even in more modern show, Babylon 5, JMS is an atheist, but B5 is quite well entrenched in biblical themes. Even going so far as to have a priest and a devil/demon in the Lost Tales DVD.
But as said, "Back in the day" the bible in media was more prevalent.
But as said, "Back in the day" the bible in media was more prevalent.
Not sure if you meant to imply that this was original with Pal's film. I may be misreading you. It comes from Well's novel (1899, if memory serves):
"In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth."
Sir Rhosis
Yeah, but the movie played up the religious angle significantly more. Skimming through the novel on Project Gutenberg, it seems fairly ambivalent about religion; the narrator clearly believes in God and is as religious as a typical late 19th-century Englishman would be, but one of the supporting characters is a curate who's portrayed rather negatively, as an unstable man who thinks the Martians are instruments of God's judgment bringing down the Apocalypse. Whereas the movie, as one would expect of a film made during the Hays Code, is much more reverential toward the church and its representatives. The film climaxes with the characters taking refuge in a church where people are praying for deliverance just before the Martians die, implying that their prayers were answered. In the book, churches are just ubiquitous parts of the English scenery, noted mainly for their bells and their towers.
I always thought that the Pal WotW was a bit much, with everybody running into churches like that. Then 9/11 happened and everybody did that in real life. Then Spielberg made his remake with very 9/11 overtones. I don't know as there is a church in the whole movie.
People are weird.
People are weird.
In regards "Who Mourns for Adonais" I recommend listening to this episode from "Mission Log: A Roddenberry Star Trek Podcast. https://www.missionlogpodcast.com/who-mourns-for-adonais/ They go into great detail about Roddenberry's religious views and how the line "Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one quite adequate" did not originally include the second sentence and how furious Roddenberry was that this was done without his approval.
As noted above, referencing or quoting the Bible as if it was merely a work of classic literature is far different from expressing belief in it's divine authorship. Many of the TOS references are nothing more than cultural touchstones in the fashion of quoting Shakespeare, Dickens, or Milton.
As noted above, referencing or quoting the Bible as if it was merely a work of classic literature is far different from expressing belief in it's divine authorship. Many of the TOS references are nothing more than cultural touchstones in the fashion of quoting Shakespeare, Dickens, or Milton.
@Christopher nailed my point exactly. The line is from the book, but the tone is quite something else.
As for the value of the Bible today, I was raised in a very religious home and believed in it til my 30s. Now I'm (mostly) an athiest, but still see the Bible as foundational literature that we should all be familiar with (at least any of us with an interest in Western culture). Knowing the Bible as well as I do lets me understand so much more of the context of art and literature. I'll bet even Rodenberry could appreciate the Bible on that level.
--Alex
Thanks for sharing that. And that makes sense that NBC would be concerned enough to want to add that line for fear of upsetting viewers who were more religiously inclined.
In only twenty two years later we’ll see Patrick Stewart regard the embracing of religion as “horrifying”, referring to people earlier abandoning religion as an “achievement”.
You don't have to wait that long -- TAS: "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth" in 1974, just 7 years after "Adonais," told the same kind of story but had Kirk unambiguously tell the alien god figure "We don't need you anymore." Note that, despite Roddenberry later disowning TAS, it was the one Trek show where he had complete creative control.
I should have seen that coming.
Stewart or Picard? I think both are probably true.
Mind you, I wonder what Chakotay or Kira's opinions on this might be?
I saw that as being more about rationality vs. blind superstition, rather than necessarily being about religion per se. There have been people who have pursued religion in a very rational and thoughtful way, even if it's often the irrational, fanatical practitioners who dominate the history books. According to "Yesteryear," even Vulcans still have shrines to honor their gods.
In TWOK there's also McCoy referring to the Genesis account of creation as a "myth." (The Southern Baptist Convention had a hissy-fit about that.)
That's certainly not the stance that Who Watches the Watchers took. And I don't think it was the stance that Roddenberry took either. Certainly not post-TOS.
Which is why decades later there are Star Trek fans who, when they encounter lines like the one in Yesteryear or much of DS9's Prophets plots have a surprised and negative reaction.
Most Christians around the world accept that Genesis is not literally true. The official position of the Vatican is that science correctly explains the origins of the physical universe, while the Bible metaphorically accounts for the origins and nature of the human soul. American Creationists and Biblical literalists are not representative of Christianity as a whole. Indeed, the Creationist movement isn't even rooted in religion, but in politics. People like William Jennings Bryan mistook Darwin's theories for European "Social Darwinist" philosophies that misappropriated Darwin's ideas to justify classist and racial oppression (including forerunners of the Nazis), and that's the real reason they objected to teaching evolution.
I admit it takes some finessing to read it the way I suggest, but it's always possible to interpret a text in more than one way, depending on what you're looking for or expecting to find.
Yes, it does read at first blush as a condemnation of religion, but if you look closer, Barron's line acknowledges that religion isn't automatically about inquisitions and holy wars, that it just has the capacity to degenerate into that. It's those abuses of religion that Picard is really horrified by, despite his kneejerk generalization equating "belief in the supernatural" with those things.
Of course, the very idea of the "Dark Ages" is a myth invented by Renaissance historians who glorified the Greeks and Romans and assumed that any culture that came after them must have been inferior, as well as Enlightenment-era thinkers who had a low opinion of the church and painted it as a superstitious entity devoted to ignorance and oppression. While it's certainly true that inquisitions and holy wars happened, the church actually played a major role in preserving literature and scholarship over the centuries of the alleged "Dark Ages." As with any human institution, religion is intrinsically neither good nor evil, but can be either depending on how people choose to apply it.
The term "myth" doesn't necessarily imply "untrue", even if it has that connotation for most people (note it's the second definition that has the additional meaning of "untrue")
https://www.google.com/search?q=myt...wyBggHEEUYPKgCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Last edited:
Brannon Braga is another outspoken atheist.
https://web.archive.org/web/2007092...2006/16/08/every_religion_has_a_mythology.php
Similar threads
