The Federation and Starfleet would never say that their goal is to drive religion out of the galaxy, though.
Roddenberry and the Biblical Allusions in TOS.
- Thread starter MakeshiftPython
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In-universe they wouldn't, no. They would just keep running into these situations where there happens to be some tyrannical godlike figures that need to be overthrown.
TOS preceded the end of Roddenberry's life, and Braga was a toddler at the time. And a great deal of TOS were contributions from other individuals like Coon, Fontana etc. There is no denying that Kirk frequently defeated a long procession of godlike and would be godlike characters, entities, etc. but I don't see atheism as the 'underlying premise' behind that show.
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I was thinking about the Voyager episode Coda. I remember when it came out I kind of rolled my eyes. OF COURSE on Star Trek a Near-Death Experience isn't actually going to be a spiritual experience. OF COURSE it would turn out to be an evil alien.
Agreed.
Again: Gene Roddenberry was not the only writer of TOS. It's a mistake to assume that a 1960s episodic TV series would have been as dominated by a single auteur's "vision" as a modern show. The majority of TV writing back then was done by freelancers, and you can't underestimate the importance of what staffers like Gene Coon, D. C. Fontana, and John Meredyth Lucas brought to the series. Only a few TOS episodes give Roddenberry a script credit, and most of them are crap. He was arguably better at producing other writers' stories than writing his own. And he didn't start buying into fandom's fantasy image of him as some great philosophical visionary until the '70s or '80s. At the time of TOS, he was just a workaday TV producer who believed his first priority was to tell entertaining stories, with messages coming second, since the audience wouldn't hear the message if you didn't hold their attention first.
Yes, Roddenberry did have final say in choosing what stories were told and how, but a lot of his responsibility was simply making sure they churned out enough content rapidly enough to fill up 26 or more schedule slots per year. The pragmatic need of generating that quota of stories outweighed any kind of philosophical purity. Yes, TOS had a message to it, but it is facile and oversimplistic to assume that everything in it existed solely to advance that message. A lot of it was just recycling stock story tropes to keep the machine running. And it reflected a lot of different authors' voices and priorities and attitudes, not just Roddenberry's.
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Quoted because this bears repeating. Roddenberry created Star Trek, but he was far from the best writer of Star Trek.
Gene Roddenberry reputedly re-wrote, or at least touched up, a great many TOS scripts without screen credit. The fact that he isn't credited for writing an episode doesn't prove that he didn't have his hand in it.
The famous anecdote off the top of my head is "Return to Tomorrow." John Dugan was so unhappy with GR's alterations that he took his real name off the script and went with his pseudonym, John Kingsbridge:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/John_Kingsbridge
Another one: "Shore Leave," where GR is not credited as a writer but he was on the location, sitting under a tree hastily re-writing scenes while the episode itself was being shot.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Shore_Leave_(episode)#Background_information
My point is that if you like TOS, you probably liked a lot of GR's re-writes.
The famous anecdote off the top of my head is "Return to Tomorrow." John Dugan was so unhappy with GR's alterations that he took his real name off the script and went with his pseudonym, John Kingsbridge:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/John_Kingsbridge
Another one: "Shore Leave," where GR is not credited as a writer but he was on the location, sitting under a tree hastily re-writing scenes while the episode itself was being shot.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Shore_Leave_(episode)#Background_information
My point is that if you like TOS, you probably liked a lot of GR's re-writes.
While there is much beauty in the language, I would argue it's the beauty of the time period, as it was just after Shakespeare. Plus, James was a terrible translator.
Well, he didn't translate it himself, just commissioned it. But yeah, I gather the translation was based on suspect sources and contains a number of inaccuracies.
What I read is that of the legitimate sources, The Hebrew Torah, The Greek Septuagint, and the Latin Vulgate, 20% is missing and 40% is mis-translated. How that worked out I do not know.
Yeah, that's convoluted mumbo jumbo. Those are pretty exact percentages for pieces that have supposedly never been discovered. It's not like the Bible is a picture puzzle or a Lego set where one knows how many pieces should be there or what the end product should ooks like. The Bible is a collection of books.
Besides, those percentages fly in the face of the archaelogical evidence. There are over 11,000 manuscripts of the Bible. Some are minor fragments while others are entire copies of individual Bible books. The oldest manuscripts date back to 2nd CENTURY BCE.
But I digress away from the topic...
You misunderstand me, and I worded it poorly, so I'll explain. What I read said that In the King James, 20% of what's in the Torah, Tanach, Septuagint, and Vulgate is missing, and 40% of what is there is mistranslated from those sources.
I got a direct Hebrew translation with commentary for Christmas. I have really enjoyed it thus far.
^^^Is it the Literal Standard Version (LSV)? I have it. I was surprised at the original texts’ overuse of present tense and passive voice.
It was not all that conservative at all; but not because anyone in control of the programming had an overt political agenda, but rather an interest in more profit.
They saw from marketing reports that more minorities were buy TVs and watching, and the sponsors would pay for time on programming that brought them to watch in larger numbers. Thus the bigwigs (notably AT NBC) put out a memo in 1965 that creators should start to include more racially diverse casts and extras to better draw in the minority demographic.
And at NBC this started with I Spy, (with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby as the co leads), around the time the second Star Trek pilot was commissed, and the memo directive was carried over as they began developing the then new STAR TREK series.
It's this version. Quite an interesting discussion and commentary as well as reading the translation.
I intend to get a full interlinear with the Hebrew but that is down the road.
I’m late to the party but from what I have read, I think short shrift has been given to Roddenberry’s evolving attitudes on religion. In the TOS era, I think he was less the confirmed “atheist” and more a “secular humanist” criticizing the blind following of religious authority, in contrast to the kind of exploration he favored. Later, that humanism took a decidedly more atheist tenor, and exploration gave way to a bit more of its own kind of proselytizing. “The God Thing” script, from what I can tell, is one example. God is not an authority who if read accurately, would have his worshippers use the minds he gave them. Rather, he’s a defective alien. The whole “god thing” is a fraud of sorts. And in TMP, he turns the idea of Man searching for God on its head and has this godlike but childlike Vger return looking for its creator.
I get the feeling the problem with Val or Landru is not that they are frauds or child-gods but rather that they exert overarching, suffocating control. Maybe too much can be made of these isolated examples, and I certainly think an influence like Gene Coon has to be factored in - particularly in the “Bread and Circuses” story. But Roddenberry seems, at least to me, to evolve from a 1960s questioner opposing authority to later having his own kind of faith (which atheism is, since it takes a stand on what is unknown). And given the way Berman and Braga read his intent, it seems he was more friendly with imposing this faith in atheism on his TNG world - an evolution from opposing authority to imposing it.
I get the feeling the problem with Val or Landru is not that they are frauds or child-gods but rather that they exert overarching, suffocating control. Maybe too much can be made of these isolated examples, and I certainly think an influence like Gene Coon has to be factored in - particularly in the “Bread and Circuses” story. But Roddenberry seems, at least to me, to evolve from a 1960s questioner opposing authority to later having his own kind of faith (which atheism is, since it takes a stand on what is unknown). And given the way Berman and Braga read his intent, it seems he was more friendly with imposing this faith in atheism on his TNG world - an evolution from opposing authority to imposing it.
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