Did you see her wedding dress?I'm not sure which show you were watching, but Deep Space Nine it ain't.
Only a time god, a complete racist, or someone being yelled at by their mother about tradition would wear that to get married in.
Should Sisko had stepped in clash between Winn & Keiko
- Thread starter Photon
- Start date
Only a time god, a complete racist, or someone being yelled at by their mother about tradition would wear that to get married in.
Interestingly, the time he spends between creating (or beautifying) the earth and the rest of the universe seems about evenly split, too. I guess it must suck to live on one of those gazillion other planets, Vulcan or Kronos or so, knowing that much less time was spent on that.
On Day 3 God Dry created the ground & plants on all the life bearing planets in the universe.
On Day 5 God created all the Birds & sea creatures on all the life bearing planets in the universe.
On Day 6 God created the Land animals & humans on all the life bearing planets in the universe.
The thing to remember is that God is Omnitemporal, and they can have reached through time to have "made" all the planets at the same time, no matter when they had have happened to have come into existence.
As far as I know, the bible only talks about God doing these things on earth. There are no statements in the bible about him creating life on other planets - (either on supporting or precluding that possibility, though it is clear there are supposedly some other classes of beings with at least human-level intelligence, angels for example), So any argument in that direction must lean on more abstract and indirect considerations, such as you give above.
Anyway, I was just joking. More generally, given that assigning attributes such as 'omnipotence' as normally understood leads to logical paradoxes anyway, it would follow for me that 'god' is either "less than 'omnipotent' "(he can't do everything) or "more than 'omnipotent' " (he transcends our ability at theorizing about such attributes and the conceptual boxes we create).
Well, If I were to believe in such a god in the first place, but I'm more of an agnostic.
Anyway, I was just joking. More generally, given that assigning attributes such as 'omnipotence' as normally understood leads to logical paradoxes anyway, it would follow for me that 'god' is either "less than 'omnipotent' "(he can't do everything) or "more than 'omnipotent' " (he transcends our ability at theorizing about such attributes and the conceptual boxes we create).
Well, If I were to believe in such a god in the first place, but I'm more of an agnostic.
Last edited:
Keiko wasn't wrong to teach the material she was teaching, but she had a kind of dismissive tone that the subject she was covering was related to a spiritual belief for half her students.
There were better ways to approach that. Like, give a disclaimer "We're going to be talking about the wormhole today. The wormhole is important in the Bajoran belief system because it houses the Prophets who are the Gods of Bajoran religion. But this course will be focusing more on the scientific aspect than the spiritual aspect." Explain that your class focuses on the science without being dismissive toward the religion.
There were better ways to approach that. Like, give a disclaimer "We're going to be talking about the wormhole today. The wormhole is important in the Bajoran belief system because it houses the Prophets who are the Gods of Bajoran religion. But this course will be focusing more on the scientific aspect than the spiritual aspect." Explain that your class focuses on the science without being dismissive toward the religion.
Isn't that the point of the Bible?
I agree that Keiko's tone was perhaps more confrontational than it could have been, but I wouldn't really say it was out of line either. She wasn't 'hired' as a teacher for her diplomatic skills in any case, for better or worse.
As to the second point, the class session we see appears to be part of a series (the wormhole's discovery was apparently mentioned the day before), so it's possible that point came up previously.
The same can be said of the interpretions of diplomats in contact with any foreign nation who relay what they've seen at home.
Apologies, I'm not sure I understand your point.
We now know that Janeway is the source of all organic life in the universe.
Would Kieko be amiss to teach that?
Would Kieko be amiss to teach that?
Pretty-much the crux of my entire argument.
We are judging alien cultures - we have never met (supposedly) in real-life - based entirely on our own past experiences and biases. And not just 'the human way', a very "western civilization, Judaeo-Christian way". In Asian (and other) religions, you could not only meet your gods, you could interact with them, and they were fallible. We (as a culture, meaning the Federation) have purposefully created an unobtainable version of God so that we won't ever meet them. Think of every episode/movie of the ST franchise wherein we meet 'gods' - its happened a LOT. in every single one of them, the humans nope-out (even when Vulcans are more excepting!), because they absolutely refuse to believe there is something greater than themselves out there. They pay lip service to this fake 'Prime Directive' thing (that they ignore whenever it suits them), and yet do everything it their power to disprove another culture's Gods at every possible opportunity (which, BTW, is the entire basis of civilization - laws are based on customs/mores which have been derived from religions). You want to assimilate someone else? The first thing you have to do is deconstruct the foundations of their culture. The Federation is insidious.
On the other hand, until recently, DS9 was my least favorite ST series because it focused so much on religion. You guys are arguing over the validity of the Bajoran's religion as science, and we have absolute scientific proof that the commander of DS9 became their 'Prophet'. It doesn't get more real than that. And religion is just a form of 'magic', and as we all know, magic is nothing more than science we don't understand... yet. Not understanding doesn't make something 'untrue', and arguing that point is just human hubris showing through. And what Keiko was doing was arguing semantics - telling a culture that has dealt with something for centuries 'her words' for it, because she insists her words are the correct ones. Maybe when we get to an inhabited world, we should explain to them that they need to rename their planet (and people) because us humans already had a name for it? The Vulcans needed to rename themselves the 'Eridanians' for us? Because its exactly the same thing. Leave the Bajorans alone... haven't they had enough intolerant dictators telling them what to say and do? Cheers
What other understanding do humans have?
I love SF Debris short little skit about the Bible and it not being a scientific treatise:
Narrator: It's not like God sat there with Moses and explained the whole foundation of the creation to him
Narrator (as God): So, I started with light because it really represented the core of my creation, because it is both particle and wave. It provided the perfect starting point for the rest of my work.
Narrator (as Moses): And that's good right?
Narrator (as God): Oh, yes, that's very good.
Narrator (as Moses): Ok. *writes* God made light and it was good.
This is something i always find curious: how else are we suppose to experience things? I cannot change my experience to suddenly fit another cultures. By default I will view the world through my experiences and points of reference. The goal of communication is to find ways that we can have common points of references to allow us to effectively communicate those ideas, not completely change my mindset so that only one set of experiences are valid.
In a setting like Star Trek, such logic is sound; otherwise...I've come to loathe this saying with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Why? It has increasingly been used as an excuse to turn magic into science. Can we let the fantasy genre/magic remain fantastical and not try to strain everything mystical through the lens of the scientific method?
Keiko was teaching the known science of the wormhole and its inhabitants. Winn was arguing the intent of those beings, an interpretation based purely on the religious teachings. There is a massive divide between those two approaches. It was not semantics.
Like an apple...it's the object that caused man to fall from God's grace. And it's the sweet-tasting seed-delivery system of a tree.
Once again, the class was not mandatory.
Similar threads
