enough is enough?

One season into ST:DS9 and am trying to decide whether to continue. The season concluded with the straightforward message that (a) Science is Good; (b) Traditional Religion is Evil — not merely intolerant but murderous; and (c) Revisionist Religion is … Not Great But Acceptable, Whatever, We Can Sorta Work With It.

And the show seems to promise more of the same. Also: it’s not exactly subtle to have your representative of Traditional Religion played by an actor (Louise Fletcher) known only for playing one of the most monstrous characters in the history of cinema.

I once wrote that Philip Pullman created an imaginary world so that people he hated would have a place to be evil in — I could also have said as much about The Handmaid’s Tale — and I suspect that this will be the old familiar story.

I’m just so tired of it: the same beats over and over and over again. After half a century of this crap I just want a different critique of religion. I’m not asking for friends, just for more interesting and reflective haters.

P.S. As I wrote in an earlier post on this general subject, “The inability of liberalism to interrogate its own premises, and its own level of commitment to those premises, is well-known to anyone who has encountered a regnant liberal society.” This is true also of the great ancestor of liberal societies, the Roman Empire, which is certainly Leviathan, but Leviathan for your own good, barbarians! It’s all about teaching the ways of peace to conquered people, innit?

And the United Federation of Planets is the kindest, gentlest Leviathan, but Leviathan all the same, which means that its absolutely fundamental commandment is: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Leviathan — from Rome with the Jews to China with the Uighurs to the Federation with the Bajorans — has a special hatred for all people with strong religious beliefs, because they refuse to make obeisance. (In the U.S. the Jehovah’s Witnesses keep winning at the Supreme Court — but they also keep having to.) So Leviathan persecutes such believers while simultaneously weaving myths in which the deeply religious are the dangerous ones, the would-be persecutors of others, just waiting for their chance to “Corrupt the generals, infiltrate the staff, / Usurp the throne, proclaim themselves to be sun-gods, / And bring about the collapse of the whole empire.” Thus the Pax Scientia must be imposed.

Imposition begins by sanding down the rough edges of the non-Federation people who are drawn within the Federation’s orbit: transforming them into replicas of Jean-Luc Picard. That happened to Worf in TNG, and it’s happening to Kira in DS9.

Many years ago Edward Said published an incandescently angry essay called “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading.” What I’m waiting for is “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A Bajoran Reading.”

P.S. The essential book to read on all these matters — not DS9, but the larger context of how liberalism conceptualizes religious belief — is Bill Cavanaugh’s brilliant The Myth of Religious Violence. E.g.:

The myth of religious violence helps to construct and marginalize a religious Other, prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-making, secular subject. This myth can be and is used in domestic politics to legitimate the marginalization of certain types of practices and groups labeled religious, while underwriting the nation-state’s monopoly on its citizens’ willingness to sacrifice and kill. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence serves to cast nonsecular social orders, especially Muslim societies, in the role of villain. They have not yet learned to remove the dangerous influence of religion from political life. Their violence is therefore irrational and fanatical. Our violence, being secular, is rational, peace making, and sometimes regrettably necessary to contain their violence. We find ourselves obliged to bomb them into liberal democracy.