Species no longer exist 31st century?

I doubt it. Polygamy among consenting adults would almost certainly have been legal on United Earth territory long before the Federation was founded, since there are plenty of existing cultures today that practice it and there's a movement that wants it legalized in the West. Don't mistake "United Earth" for "the United States."

I would imagine that United Earth would have to legalize other practices that it might have otherwise prohibited upon founding the Federation, though. At least two of the Federation's founding worlds, Vulcan and Andor, both practice ritualize homicide (in the form of the Ushaan and the kal-if-fee), for instance; presumably United Earth would have had to legalize these sorts of dueling rituals (perhaps on the rationale that both parties have to consent to them first?) when it signed the Articles of the Federation.

 

I hated "Barge of the Dead" and how the novelverse proceeded to treat the hallucinations as real communications. It makes no logical sense that anyone can travel to the afterlife, one that they know little of, no less, by putting themself in a coma.

 

I liked Barge of the Dead. Tapestry and Coda presented near-death experiences as illusions induced by alien entities, while Barge of the Dead showed that some NDEs might be genuine spiritual experiences. They kept it ambiguous, which is how NDEs are in real life. The episode never said that anyone can travel to the afterlife, just that B'Elanna could at that specific time in her life.

 

Not really. These days there's a pretty good scientific understanding of the neurological bases for the mental state and perceptions associated with "near-death experiences."

As for "Barge of the Dead" and the subsequent novels, the Trek universe is full enough of telepaths, alternate dimensions, and hyperadvanced aliens that there's no need to assume a literal Klingon afterlife is the only explanation for the connection that B'Elanna and her mother experienced. TOS established (with Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner, and Miranda Jones) that some humans in the Trek universe have latent telepathic potential, so maybe some Klingons do too. Maybe B'Elanna inherited that potential from her mother, and it enabled them to make a telepathic connection when the right fluke circumstance occurred. Or maybe Voyager passed through a technobabble space-whatsis field that let B'Elanna perceive her mother's thoughts somehow. Just because the characters interpreted it as a supernatural experience doesn't prove that it was; after all, humans have been misinterpreting scientifically explainable phenomena as supernatural ones for millennia.

 

Where do we have this established? The books seem to go against it (I'm thinking of the situation with T'Prynn and Pennington's fake marriage as the first thing to come to mind) but I can't remember anything on screen that would serve as evidence either for or against this being the case in the Federation. I can't even remember anything that comes anywhere near that topic.

 

Characters from the Vanguard novels.

 

Not exactly, he was born a few decades later. The Vanguard novels are definitely worth reading.

 

Oh, definitely; it's in a lot of ways TOS DS9-style, both in the obvious (based on a space station out on the frontier near aggressive powers) and the thematic (heavy focus on interstellar politics, character development, and interpersonal relationships). It does a lot to flesh out the state of things in the 23rd century, and it gives Tholians a ton of development as a race too.

 

What exactly constitutes serious? Life-threatening? I'm sure there are bound to be Federation supreme court cases based on this.

 

I loved that show.

 

Oh, I'm sure, yeah. Though I don't think that was a quote of the text of the law; I'd assume the text of the law is at least a little more exact than that.

 

Loopholes the size of wormholes, otherwise.

 

True.

The idea of a "soul", at least in real life, does not even match what is in the Hebrew texts. There, "soul" is simply you and me, our body. The Hebrews who wrote those books we call today as Old Testament and New Testament does not have a concept of "Body, Soul, and Spirit". To them, "body and soul" are one and the same, and "spirit" is the breath of life.

When God breath his spirit into man, "he became a living soul" or if you will, "a living body". So, in the original Hebrew mindset and belief, there is no "soul" "soul" as we know it today. That's why many of them does not believe in the resurrection of the dead. But in the New Testament, it was explained that the resurrection simply meant the changing of our body into an immortal one.

Could it be that it means changing of the old/corporeal soul/body into a new/incorporeal soul/body, at least in Trek?

Anyway, the above is not known commonly thanks to the prevalent belief in "body, soul, and spirit" popularised by Christianity/Catholicism which they took from the other religions around them.

Even Buddhism's reincarnation, there's a growing "belief" or "theory" (whichever you prefer) that the "past experiences" we are seeing in regressions were actually memories stored in our DNA Memory. It wasn't a soul soul.

Then there is also the belief or theory that we do leave behind something, an energy or aura if you will, when something very important/significant happens. This later is sensed by so-called "ghost hunters" and they interpret it as "souls" but in reality, highly possible it was only a remnant energy/aura. Again, not a soul as we know it today.

 

That's pure junk science. The idea of "genetic memory" is based on a single study from the '60s that seemed to show that if you taught a maze to flatworms, ground them up, and fed them to other flatworms (science Sweeney Todd style!), the latter worms would learn the maze faster, presumably because they absorbed the memory from the flatworms they ate. But later experiments were never able to replicate that result, so apparently it was just -- wait for it -- a fluke. We now know that the DNA theory of memory storage was completely wrong. But by the time the initial result was discredited, it had already been popularized by the media, so it's continued to thrive in fiction and pop culture even though it's half a century out of date.

Not to mention that the number of discrete chromosomal segments that are mixed and matched in reproduction is finite, and with each successive generation, a smaller number of genes gets passed on. So the further back you go, even as early as 8-10 generations but especially once you get to maybe 13 generations and beyond, it gets increasingly likely that you have no genes at all in common with a given ancestor. Beyond maybe 3-4 centuries back, all your ancestors will be genealogical forebears rather than genetic forebears, so even if there were such a thing as "genetic memory," it wouldn't let you remember being, say, Cleopatra or Charlemagne or a character from Assassin's Creed or whatever.

Also pure rubbish. Ghost hunters are frauds; the scientific explanations for alleged "hauntings" are well-understood. They're usually the result of subsonics, inaudibly low vibrations that can create a sense of anxiety, cause strange noises or physical effects like doors opening or objects falling over, and even induce visual hallucinations by vibrating the eye and causing specks or floaters in the field of view to spread out and appear like ghostly forms. There are also cases where magnetic fields can induce altered mental states that cause dread, paralysis, and the perception of being stalked or abducted; these days, the effect underlies a lot of alien-abduction hallucinations, but in the past, it was no doubt interpreted as a ghostly or demonic phenomenon.

It's not very meaningful to talk about "energy" as an entity in its own right. Energy isn't a thing, it's a property possessed by things. Generally when we talk about "pure energy," that's a shorthand for talking about photons/electromagnetic radiation, particles that possess energy but no rest mass. But massless particles are constrained to travel at exactly the speed of light, no slower, so they can't linger anywhere.

 

People have been proposing biological explanations for NDEs for decades. Doesn't necessarily mean they are correct. Many have reported that their experiences felt too real to be dreams or hallucinations. Some have accurately reported what people were doing nearby when their physical eyes were closed. Some have even accurately predicted future events.