Space: The Final ... Parable

I have always loved the Star Trek adventure world since I was a kid, but what's it really about? I have always maintained that there is no such thing as "mere" entertainment. Every story teaches something.

"Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry put together a proposal for a science fiction series in 1960. He publicly marketed it as a Western in outer space as a kind of "Wagon Train to the stars", but privately told friends he was modeling it on Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" intending each episode to act on two levels, both as a suspenseful adventure story, and as a morality parable."

"In Gene Roddenberry’s imagining of the future [...] religion is completely gone. Not a single human being on Earth believes in any of the nonsense that has plagued our civilization for thousands of years. This was an important part of Roddenberry’s mythology. He, himself, was a secular humanist and made it well-known to writers of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation that religion and superstition and mystical thinking were not to be part of his universe. On Roddenberry’s future Earth, everyone is an atheist. And that world is the better for it."

This is squarely in line with atheistic humanism which Weigel warns about in his book, saying

twentieth century advanced thinkers widely predicted that ... humanity, tutored by science, [would] lose its "need" for religion ... [r]esidues remain: in the positivism Western high culture learned from Comte, the subjectivism it learned from Feuerbach, the materialism it learned from Marx, the radical willfulness it learned from Nietzsche - and the assumption that biblical religion is for children.

So, I guess, enjoy the series, but make sure you know whose parables you're getting.