Religion is, for the most part, not discussed in Star Trek, partially because of Gene Roddenberry’s atheism… but you have to wonder what sort of crazy religions the proles are coming up with when there are so many gods out there.
You guys are missing out on one of the big continuity/structural problems in the Star Trek universe. In TNG (I forget the episode), the crew of the good ship Enterprise discover that warp travel is polluting space. A civilization living near an important inter-stellar route (the soxmic Route 66, I suppose) complains to the Federation that their warp travel is damaging the corner of the galaxy. This is a great shock to everyone and taken quite hard by LaForge. He has trouble believing that the beautiful technology he has studied (or worshiped) his entire adult life can be so devastating.
Anyway, Starfleet Command considers the Enterprise’s report and issues a directive that all starships will refrain from speeds above Warp 5 (I believe) unless in dire emergency. This rule is iggnored not long after this episode, because the new speed limit makes the travel over great distances impossibly long for good storytelling. What would have taken days to travel, now takes decades.
Personally, I never understood why starships travel anything less than their absolute best possible speed. It seems to me that I would always want to get where I am going as soon as possible. Even in my car, I travel at the best speed it will safely and legally travel. Why go slower???
Wow. This post got much longer than I meant for it to be.
And yes, the Warp 5 speed limit went the way of Shatner’s youth not long afterward. Supposedly, Intrepid-class ships (Voyager, for one) have a special warp nacelle design that negates the problem.
This isn’t canon, but it sounds good to me. Supposedly the bottleneck isn’t the maximum output of the engines, but the fuel supply.
Starships scoop up interstellar hydrogen as they go, and convert part of it (? how is never said) into antimatter, which is stored in the antimatter pods.
Apparently this can only be done so quickly; at any speed above warp 4 TOS, or warp 7 TNG, the ship is dipping into it’s antimatter reserves.
Voyager is maintaing an longterm average of warp 8 (counting stops and such) but even then they’re constantly short on fuel, and looking for deuterium and other enriched energy sources.