Star Trek Doesn't Need to Squash Beef With God
Gene Roddenberry was no saint, but he wasn't a "new atheist" either.
Ryan Britt
July 28, 2016
Standing in the radiant blue light of God’s disembodied head, Captain Kirk holds up one finger. “Excuse me,” he says, “what does God need with a starship?”
It’s a fair question, albeit not the sort of query deities commonly receive in pop culture. This scene from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier blurs the line between the inhuman and the divine in a less than subtle way, but the clunkiness doesn’t undermine its significance within the Star Trek canon. It represent the clearest example of the venerable sci-fi franchise tackling the big question of religion. “What does God need with a starship?” is a neat rephrasing of the real question: If mankind can innovate its way to godlike powers and peace, does the all-powerful become redundant?
The answer to that question and the question of whether or not Star Trek is inherently anti-religious has become more complicated for one clear reason: The shows ideology doesn’t conform to modern assumptions about religion and politics — or politics at all for that matter.
At the end of the Jesus-heavy, original series episode “Bread and Circuses,” Dr. McCoy says “We represent many beliefs.” The Vulcan philosophy of IDIC (“infinite diversity in infinite combinations”) also asserts a pluralistic view of various faiths. And yet, Trek’s creator – the late Gene Roddenberry – seemed to have harbored an overwhelmingly antipathy for organized religion, one he weaponized in his writing for the original Star Trek series, the animated series, and early movies that were never actually made.
https://www.inverse.com/article/18944-religion-star-trek-gene-roddenberry-atheist-jame-kirke-and-god
= new reply since forum marked as read
