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What about Sarah's life and her rights?

But I agree that for most of DS9, the Prophets were quite satisfyingly portrayed as unsettlingly divorced from any concerns of benevolence/malevolence.
Which is perhaps the most salient point that can be made. Their notion of what constitutes good and evil reflected closely their own interests in their safety and, to some extent,their desire to protext Bajor. Their notions of time further complicates their ability to interface with the rest of the universe on moral grounds, a quality they at least partially share with the Q. And they need to be taught what their specific obligations are with regard to the Bajorans ("If you want to be gods, then be gods").
 
Given we see that the prophets have no compunction rewriting Quark and Zek's brains simply because they find their life philosophies distasteful, or the fact they IIRC suggest killing Akorem Laan, or the fact that they vaporize(if that is what they did) to the Dominion fleet, mostly because Sisko challenged them over the fact they didn't seem to care for Bajor before hand, etc...

Its clear the prophets don't have human or human based morality.

Also honestly I get the impression the D'jarras or Bajoran caste system was given by the prophets-they don't condemn it in Ascension, they basically just say "its time has passed".

The fact they are willing to possess a woman as a mere instrument for their aims, should not be surprising at all. If they have any morality, its a morality related to their safety...and maybe vaguely tied to their relationship with Bajor. Beyond that, they are manifestly amoral.

Reflecting only on the details told in the story, consent makes no appearance. Mary is never asked about actions that will impact reproduction, sexuality, or marriage. At best, there is passive acceptance, perhaps filtered through a sense of inequality. You might argue that because men were wrote down the story, it reflected the attitudes toward women, and that some element of consent was not valued by the writers. Unfortunately, that makes the annunciation closer to all those stories in which the gods treat humans as their playthings, including in matters of sexuality and reproduction. In general, the ancient western world made women (to varying degrees) responsible for being raped. A rapist might be punished for a crime against property (due to the financial harm to the family) or a public crime, but not necessarily against the woman. And there were more than a few cases in which a woman was forced to marry her rapist, making the question of consent--such as it was--effectively moot.

The case of Mary isn't sexual reproduction though? Its a mystery in Christian theology. But it is pointedly not say Zeus and Europa.

Jesus is pre existing and eternal, but is also Mary's biological son. The exact mechanism for this is not really described, and is in fact treated as mysterious...because it is.

Not to mention-Mary is told, her son will be the King of Israel, and the prophesied Messiah. For a woman living in a society that was both extremely discontented and downtrodden-it would have been very hopeful. "Your son will be the King and the savior of His people". That would have been something to rejoice over-in a place where the Jewish people were downtrodden by a client king, and an oppressive empire lording over them. In fact, Mary was rejoiceful in the text.

Not to mention Mary says, "Let it be".

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!" But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

And Mary said to the angel, "How will this be, since I am a virgin?"

And the angel answered her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." And Mary said, "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." And the angel departed from her.

Mary's doubt is how this will be possible, as she is a virgin betrothed. The angel declares what will happen and she doesn't simply passively accept. She enthusiastically accepts.


 
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Given we see that the prophets have no compunction rewriting Quark and Zek's brains simply because they find their life philosophies distasteful, or the fact they IIRC suggest killing Akorem Laan, or the fact that they vaporize(if that is what they did) to the Dominion fleet, mostly because Sisko challenged them over the fact they didn't seem to care for Bajor before hand, etc...

Its clear the prophets don't have human or human based morality.
Don't they? Over the course of DS9 we also see humans rewire someone's brain, allow people to die, and vaporize enemies. So maybe the Prophets are very human-like morally after all. ;)
 
Don't they? Over the course of DS9 we also see humans rewire someone's brain, allow people to die, and vaporize enemies. So maybe the Prophets are very human-like morally after all. ;)
And do the gods reflect us or does we reflect the gods?

Your absolutely right.
 
Yeah, that's very questionable. Given what we know of the Prophets though we can speculate maybe they didn't just take her by force, they gave her a vision and made her realize the necessity of her actions, but it's not clear. Like in Reckoning, they only took a willing host.
 
Interesting... I never really realized that Sarah was a real, albeit alien, person in the show. It occurs to me now, looking at this thread, that the wormhole aliens weren't corporeal so that's not how I should've interpreted it. But I always figured that a wormhole alien assumed the role themselves somehow. Because the wormhole aliens are always going on about how things, such as those involving Bajor, are "corporeal matters" so going to the lengths they did to get an emissary seems odd.
 
Sisko guesses that the a Prophet took over Sarah's body, then left it again later. The Prophets never explicitly confirm this guess, but they do imply that he is correct.
 
Problematic in what sense?

It felt like they threw together an origin story for Sisko at the last minute and she was the missing piece that they could not find enough time to deal with, so she just was a woman possessed by a spirit. When Beverly Crusher's candle boyfriend does that, he's acting wrongly. When Rapey Prophets do it, its just a plot point. Can't have it both ways.
 
The problem with the prophets is that they see all events past, present and future.
They controlled her because to them it‘s just the way it was, is and will be.
When you think about it, they don’t even have real agency themselves.
They just act in the way for the universe to be consistent.

It sucks for Sarah, and it is rape.
But deterministic omniscience can’t co-exist with agency.

You could go further and wonder if they act at all. An action requires changing the state of something, but change is temporal. Honestly, the whole "prophets aren't linear in time" thing never made sense, and the writers couldn't even keep it consistent in the first scene it was introduced in, let alone the whole series.

As for Sarah, well it's clear that she was the Bajoran mythos equivalent to the character of Mary in the christian mythos, so she's also treated as nothing more than an incubator. The Bajoran religion is closely modelled on the Abrahamic ones, particularly christianity.


Not to mention-Mary is told, her son will be the King of Israel, and the prophesied Messiah. For a woman living in a society that was both extremely discontented and downtrodden-it would have been very hopeful. "Your son will be the King and the savior of His people". That would have been something to rejoice over-in a place where the Jewish people were downtrodden by a client king, and an oppressive empire lording over them. In fact, Mary was rejoiceful in the text.

Oppressive empire? Let me tell you, if I had to live in the antiquity, I'd want to live under Roman rule (more Republic era than Empire era, but still).
People enjoyed more rights and technological comforts under Roman rule than anything that preceeded. On the rights front, people still enjoyed more under Roman rule than on the medieval christian states that succeeded! Freedom of religion, for one!
 
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They didn't have another explanation handy for why Ben doesn't remember Sarah when he sees the picture. A troubling piece of writing all around.

The writers could have made it so that rather than taking over the body of a human woman, a prophet could have transformed into a human woman temporarily. In that scenario there would never have been a "real" Sarah, just a body and cover identity created by the prophets.
 
It felt like they threw together an origin story for Sisko at the last minute and she was the missing piece that they could not find enough time to deal with, so she just was a woman possessed by a spirit.
The entire storyline was about the reveal. It's not as though they wrote one and a half episodes about Sisko's quest and then tried to figure out what the ending would be. And even if that had happened, there are still multiple ways to answer what was going on. For better or worse, the ending is the ending they decided to do.

When Beverly Crusher's candle boyfriend does that, he's acting wrongly. When Rapey Prophets do it, its just a plot point.
I fail to see how the two events are the same, but okay.
 
The writers could have made it so that rather than taking over the body of a human woman, a prophet could have transformed into a human woman temporarily. In that scenario there would never have been a "real" Sarah, just a body and cover identity created by the prophets.
Why does it need to be idealized? Women were made pregnant without their consent, whether in myth or reality, whether the women were themselves free or enslaved, and still committed themselves to raising the children that resulted. That takes nothing from the dignity of their children, nor of Benjamin Sisko.
 
They could have fixed it by having the prophet Mom clarify “We showed her a vision and she knew how important it was to let us in”. Without that it implies just stealing her body like Keiko and Jake.

The only reason we have to think that might have been the situation is that the Prophet chose Kira because she was willing.
 
In the arguably most famous one of them all, the Christmas story, Mary consents to her becoming pregnant before it happens. Though perhaps if you try to read it as 'unfriendly' as possible, you could read it as a submission, I suppose ( "I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered (to the angel). "May your word to me be fulfilled." ).
Kinda a divine version of sleep with me or lose your job. I mean god was definitely acting from a position of power over Mary.

But it's all bull cause if God could just make Adam then why not just make Jesus why the need to impregnate Mary.

Also Sarah was a crap piece of retroactive storytelling the Siscos were such a loving tight knit family I just didn't buy Papa Joe's "by the way son she's your real mom"
 
The writers could have made it so that rather than taking over the body of a human woman, a prophet could have transformed into a human woman temporarily. In that scenario there would never have been a "real" Sarah, just a body and cover identity created by the prophets.

The issue with that is it blows away the need for Sisko himself as their link to corporeal/linear existence, if a Prophet can become linear.
 
The whole "Sisko part prophet " thing is one of the MANY reasons I thought season 6 and 7 (with a handful of exceptions) really went off the rails,ruining so much of the good characterisation and storytelling of the previous seasons.
 
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