In TNG era Star Trek, religion gets almost no play among Federation characters. In Deep Space 9, it seems clear that every other race has some sort of religious framework, even if played for laughs (Ferengi religion is based on getting rich enough to buy entry to the Divine Treasury). Only humans have none.

At one point Captain Sisko even tells an alien, “Humans don’t have souls. We don’t believe in them.”

That struck me on multiple levels but particularly the blithe assumption that belief determines the nature of reality. Kind of religious in its own right.

What I want to know on this last point is how did religion suddenly stop?

Star Wars is just flying adventures wrapped up in a ‘rebellion’ over tax rates, or something. Mind you, when the black guy took off his white uniform in the laster outing — I never call it armour because every shot at the stormtroopers kills the wearer — you could say it was the real black man emerging from the straitjacket of white oppression, if one was so inclined to say such things.

That and the ending. Yuck.

But the politics sometimes grated at a lower level.

There was one string of episodes that struck me as interesting. [spoiler]

When the humans were stuck on New Caprica under Cylon rule, Col. Tigh’s resistance used suicide bombers. This was meant to, and did, raise some moral issues for American society facing the Iraq war. Since one was meant to sympathize with the resistance.

I shared some of those- a group ordering men and women to commit suicide is always going to pose at least the hard moral question involved in asking that of anyone. Even if they have volunteered for the duty. For example, I gather that Catholic German officers struggled long and hard with the idea of committing suicide even to kill Hitler. And their struggle was an honourable one.

Although, IIRC, the show focused more on the morality of using suicide bombers against the enemy and against human collaborators, than of the death of the bombers themselves.

This was actually interesting. The Cylons were military targets and the collaborators were cooperating with a genocidaire enemy, but OTOH Tigh was still running a terrorist campaign and not attacking in conventional ways. I have no idea what the laws of war were in the lost colonies but presumably he was breaking them. And the collaborators were still people trying to survive.

All that was quite interesting and valuable moral exercise. It was weaker than the writers hoped, considering the enemy were machines. Ultimately the less regarded questions of the collaborators’ lives and those of the bombers themselves were the important bits.