I think in a society that has encountered powerful supernatural creatures like Q, the concept of a God no longer makes sense.
I think there were a few moments where Picard made vague references to an afterlife that sounded blandly Judaeo-Christian - IIRC an episode where the entire crew was going to die and some worried redshirt came to ask for solace. The scene was a bit like a ST version of Gandalf’s ‘The journey does not end here’ bit.
There was an episode of DS9 – I just saw it recently – where Dax was reunited with another Trill who, in a previous female host, had been married to Dax’s earlier male host. Now, they were both joined to new female hosts. They rekindled their romance - including an on-screen kiss - and Dax was ready to live in exile to run off with her (a strong Trill taboo).
I remember that kiss being kind of a big deal back in the early 90s when it aired.
I kind of like the idea that whenever the show visits Earth, there’s a group of normally dressed people off to the side chanting, “Death to the Federation!” No one else really knows who they are or why they’re saying it – they just shake their heads and maybe chuckle and move on.
A main character is one who appears in the opening credits and shows up in every, or nearly every episode.
Maybe NCC-1701¥ could encounter a Guild Navigator who would lead them to Arrakis and a certain jihadist.
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ST:TAS did the furry thing back in the 70s with Lt. M’Ress
http://mimg.ugo.com/200812/15500/cuts/mress_288x288.jpg
I hope a Muslim character is handled better than the Native American character Chakotay on Voyager. The stories focused on his spirit guide and other mystical rituals got pretty tedious and even a bit silly as the show progressed.
Which current human religions would survive intact an encounter with alien races? Would the Muslim of the 24th century even resemble one from now?
I know his point. My point is that, other than the two I fixed, I don’t see anything wrong with that. I was countering his rather prude point. I fixed them by being even more progressive, not less.
The exception, furries, comes from the problem that they would be talking about real creatures, rather than just a fantasy. You can’t dress up like a black person–why would you be able to dress like another species? It would seem exploitative, kinda like wollywogs.
I can’t figure out how they could build a show around that without the message being that furries are bad–even though they aren’t in modern times.
(Bringing in an anthropomorphic creature is not in any way dealing with furrydom, any more than Disney is making points about furries in their animated canon.)
Not just silly. Blatantly racist, with combining all Native American tribes into a mishmash and saying that it was aliens who gave them all their technology.
Sfdebris actually views “Tattoo” and its racism as the lowest point of the Star Trek franchise. Below even “Code of Honor” from TNG. At least that was just racist by implication.
Very early on, you can hear him convert it to black people.
And he reveals it all came from some guy who pretended to be a Native American and wasn’t even a scholar on them.
Unless you and I are living in the Men in Black universe, I think it’s fair to say that there’s a difference between people in animal costumes and alien species.
Being butch just makes the characters non-telegenic, where we’re going for something that is going to challenge middle America. Add sadomasochism and suddenly you have a couple of characters that are sufficiently scandalous to earn a place on the show.
Or the inverse, you put in sadomasochism in a set of plain characters, and you’re just cashing in on scandalous TV.
Mixing them forces people to pay attention to a couple of non-telegenic characters and question their actions towards one another.
The headscarf was a norm in Middle Eastern culture before Islam was around. The religion adapted to culture rather than the other way around. Jesus wasn’t born on December 25, either.
Well…there’s probably a 1 in 365 chance that he was.
He was born Oct 3rd, 2 BCE at Sinai Saints Memorial Hospital/manger. I have Polaroids…
A main character is a character on the bridge who appears in nearly every episode and has lines vs. a background character.
The main religions of Earth - Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. - have all been around for a thousand years or more. There’s no reason to think that they will wither away just because we’re bopping around in spaceships, now. However…
…is an interesting point. And religions do change over time - modern Reform Judaism doesn’t look much like the religion of the Temple priests and Sadducees of the first century BCE, to take one example. So I would expect different forms of existing religions, perhaps influenced by the shock of meeting sentient non-human races, as well as several new religions, birthed maybe by the same event.
Bashir in DS9 is an Arab. I’m currently watching the series through for the first time (up to season 4 episode 8) and haven’t noticed him doing anything specifically Muslim.
Worf did do some Klingon things. We don’t know what was Klingon culture and what was religion.
Worf’s foster parents were Jewish. IMO, that was their ethnicity, but they never played toward any religious aspects.
Chekov was Russian, but never struck me as being a Communist. Again, nationality/ethnicity, not religion/political creed.
Bajorians a religion. Ferengi, maybe. It’s hard for me to tell with the Ferengi if it’s just a strong cultural thing or if it’s religious.
I think any demonstrations of religious beliefs among alien races in the ST universe are mostly to demonstrate that alien races are different than humans and come with different cultural biases/backgrounds. It seems the writers preferred to present a universe of cultural diversity by displaying a diversity of cultures.
But what do I know?