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Reviews
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Reckoning (1998)
"Come, Child", says the annoying, religious leader to a middle-aged fellow kneeling nearby.
Another boring episode featuring Bajoran religious fanaticism at work. No doubt this episode was tailored to accommodate the American obsession with religion. It's a wonder that Bajor manages to be a space-faring culture with such backwards mentality. Hear this: to them, it's perfectly logical that a weird space phenomenon (the gate), as well as their planet's meteorology and geology, could be severely upset depending on the particular location of an archaeological artefact.
Something funny about Bajor, but also about most other Star Trek "races", is the fact that they achieve global unity in such eminently polarising subjects as religion or ideology. Look at human religions, and see how they're prone to split into rival branches, over trivial, petty details, and with such intensity that their members are not above killing people from the other side at the slightest "provocation". Religion has never been a unifying force: it's been one of the main dividers within humankind, and a willing originator of death, suffering, intolerance.
The fact that this is a work of science fiction does not mean that shoddy plot designs should be acceptable, when they breach the credibility of a universe based on progress.
Star Trek: Voyager: Sacred Ground (1996)
An episode sacrificed to America's obsession with religion.
A perfectly boring episode exclusively built to feed the American obsession with faith and religion. Apparenty, even bible belt types watch space faring characters riding futuristic technologies that would have never existed had "faith" managed to impose its way back in the Renaissance.
How many of these devotional types realise that without science, most of them would not even exist? Without science, few of us would survive our first weeks, and amongst those who would, only a minority would reach the ripe age of thirty-five. The simple concept of infant mortality was never a notion religious natures concerned themselves with before science became dominant in our cultures.
Envisioning science as a system of beliefs is a dangerous and fallacious perception, only fitting the reductionist perspective of religious agendas, who see life as a cartoonish struggle between good and evil. Science is not a belief. It's a collection of empirical theories in constant trial, destined to be replaced when new ones prove to be more effective within their field and within the system. Scientists who participate in the stupid debate of science vs. religion probably have a devotional tendency themselves. They will be easily outclassed in such debates, for the simple reason that religious people cannot be reached by logic or reason, since their beliefs are solely based on irrational structures.
The very existence of episodes like this one, in an otherwise relatively intelligent series, is a worrisome warning. It predicts a future where America will increasingly fail to compete with no-nonsensical countries such as China, India, or pretty much any other culture on its way up, and not as religiously fanatical as the US.
The results are already out there for all to see anyway, with the steady decline of American scientific achievements and the rise of tomorrow's superpowers (which might even include good old Russia).