Star Trek and Christianity

Bonnie and I went to the Star Trek movie on Friday and it was a good movie. It is one of the best Star Trek movies I have seen. I must admit to everyone that I am a bit of a "trekkie" and did some "research" before the film came out. When I was a kid, Star Trek the Next Generation was out and I enjoyed watching that on TV each week. That TV series along with the franchise movies fed the sci-fi junkie in me. But as I have become more and more sensitive to worldview issues over the past couple of years, I noticed something different about Star Trek as I read about the franchise online on Wikipedia. I read about its development and the creator of the story line, Gene Roddenberry. In his Wikipedia article, this is what it says:

"Although Roddenberry was raised as a Southern Baptist, he did not embrace the faith; he viewed religion as the cause of many wars and suffering in human history. Roddenberry considered himself a humanist and an agnostic athiest. According to Brannon Braga, "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."

That is a powerful quote. In other words, one of the main reasons for creating the series in the 1960s was to project a sort of "utopian" society based on athiestic naturalism. Athiesm is, of course, the belief that there is no God. Naturalism is the belief that the Cosmos is all that there is and all that there ever will be and that every is determined by random cause and effect. All that can be known about the universe can only be done through scientific observation. Scientific naturalism has advanced (and succeeded in large degree) into convincing the world (at least the scientific and academic world) that macro-evolution as taught by Charles Darwin is correct and that everything that exists in the world and universe today is the result of billions of years of random naturalistic causation.

It appears that Gene Roddenberry and the other creators of the Star Trek franchise is attempting to produce a visual and theatric portrayal of what an athiestic, completely naturalistic, society would look like. According to their viewpoint the universe would be completely fine, in fact "better for it", without "any of the nonsense that has plagued humanity." That plague, in Roddenberry's viewpoint, would be religion - specifically Christianity. If you watch the television series through the lens of faith, you will notice that all of the characters and episodes of the series deal with athiestic altruism and scientific and naturalistically based fantasy.

We live in a society and in a time of a supercharged media and entertainment system that is able to bring movies to the big screen that have eye-popping special effects and dramatic storylines that captivate us and take hold of our attention in ways that have never occurred before with such power. Because of this, we must be so very careful on how such information is disseminated into our minds and into our families. We must educate ourselves and our families of the major worldviews and thought systems in the world and be able to recognize them when they surface in the mainstream media and entertainment industry. Not knowing the thought systems that compete against the Gospel will put yourself at risk of being dulled through special effects, dramatic sequences, and headlines into believing or assuming something that is contrary to the Word of God.

I am not saying that you should not go watch Star Trek. But I am encouraging all of you to be careful. There are too many individuals in the United States and throughout the world that devote too much energy into creating fantasy lives for themselves. Movies like Star Trek and Star Wars (both movies I adored as a child and still enjoy to this day) have created complete secondary realities for many people. They operate out of a worldview and moral ethic that is based on a science-fiction film or television series and not on the realities of this world. I have a personality that is attracted to science fiction and fantastical stories like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Lord of the Rings. If you are like me, you understand the attraction of losing yourself in another world - learning about all the facts, histories, cultures, and wars of this non-existent world. You get lost in it, and forget that it DOES NOT EXIST. But you escape into it, you are released from the anxieties of your life into another time and another place, yes even another galaxy.

But, I have been taught by the word of God, and I thank God for that!:

Proverbs 28:19: He who works his land will have abundant food, but the one who chases fantasies will have his fill of poverty.

Ecclesiastes 12:13: Now all has been heard; here is the conlusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man.

Isaiah 40:8: The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.

Matthew 6:22-23: The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. if then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

I Corinthians 13:11-12: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fullty, even as I am fully known.

Beware of fantasy and lay hold the Word of God