Finished a major series of essays this week! Feels good, but got further to go. Get the details in this week’s vlog:

I’ve been working on one of my writing goals for the year this week – writing a series about writing a story. Very meta. More details in today’s vlog:

Okay, it’s time to be honest. I’ve been very hard on the Bajoran religion over the last month but I hope it’s clear that comes from a place of love. (For storytelling, if not Bajorans.) However there is admittedly one piece of important context I’ve been glossing over up until now. That piece is called paganism. The modern equivalent to that is humanism but that’s a topic for another time. For now what’s important is to remember that the central purpose of religion is to connect people to the transcendent.

Paganism arises when people look for the transcendent in the material. Whether it be the unbridled power and fury of the storm or the frightening dark deeps of the ocean there are glimpses of the transcendent all around us. The pagan mindset points to these material things as the place where the transcendent meets us.

In some ways the pagan mind is the purest expression of mankind’s quest for that which exceeds us, looking for the eternal under every stone and behind every cloud. However like pure steel, paganism is very fragile. If you venerate the sea then your culture must live by the sea or your culture will fail. How long can you remind believers of the power of the tide if you’ve never seen a body of water wider than a creek? Not very long, I’d wager.

What about mankind itself? Even the Abrahamic religions agree that men have a bit of the divine in them, why can’t we rely on what’s inside ourselves to transcend? Well, that gets a bit tricky. The problem with vesting transcendence in mankind is that mankind is very flawed and those flaws get in the way of the transcendent. God kings tend to have feet of clay. They crumble quickly, leaving no place for belief to vest in. Even a dynasty tends to fail after a few generations, leaving a new line of “divinity” to take over and ultimately destroying the glimpse of transcendence the religion was supposed to give.

In short, paganism tends to obscure the transcendent behind layers of human frailty and politicking.

The Greek and Roman gods are more notable for their constant adulterating and infighting than anything else. The Norse gods give glimpses of transcendent ideas that are eventually destroyed at Ragnarok. The gods of Egypt and Babylon were a mix of constantly churning elements similar to those of other pagan beliefs but they didn’t last any longer than their peers.

For the Bajorans the transcendent thing they pursued was the Prophets and the material place they sought that transcendence was their own circumstances. The Bajorans are obsessed with prophecies of trying times to come. As a result most of their religious stories revolve around someone trying to match a prophecy to a situation or receive a prophecy of their own. In many ways this is reminiscent of apocalyptic scholarship/cults of the Christian tradition.

However, the understanding of prophecies is a thing rooted in a single situation, rather than something transcendent. While there’s much debate over the End Times in Christianity, it has little bearing on the religion’s core principles. For the Bajorans the prophecies are the core tenants. As I said before, if there are no prophecies or no Bajorans the religion basically ceases to exist as this leaves the transcendence they seek out of reach. It is this weakness that makes pagan religions so very fragile.

If a group of people changes their pagan rites begin to die out. This problem can be mitigated, yet paradoxically becomes worse, if the pagan rite is centered around a divine ruler. Pharaohs and other god-kings provide stability through a line of succession. Even if an entire nation is wiped out and the material circumstances of a nation change totally if the spark of the divine still vests in a single ruler then they can transfer that conduit to a new, transcendent power.

When the shorelines flood they can retreat into the mountains and declare them a stairway to heaven. When the king dies, the divinity passes to his son. However, if the ruler does something to make themselves and their people unworthy of divinity then the entire culture is thrown into chaos. The cyclical nature of Chinese dynasties and the monotheistic experiment of Akhenaten give hints of what that might be like.

The Bajoran battles over the rank of Kai suggest their own religion shares these strengths and failings. Kai Winn practically converts the main branch of the religion to worshiping their own version of the devil, the Pah Wraiths. Likewise, the coming and going of the Cardassians poses many difficulties for Bajoran believers. While I, personally, consider the invasion of a foreign power something that should totally change native pagan religions, if not wipe them out entirely, the Bajoran religion otherwise behaves much like other pagan beliefs in Earth’s history. On that count I think it functions just fine.

Like with all the aspects of belief and storytelling that I’ve discussed this month, how you choose to handle the pagan search for transcendence in a story is a matter of taste and desired outcome. Not every story calls for exploring the way pagan religions inevitably collapse under circumstance. Most stories take place over a very short period of time and, while pagan beliefs are fragile, it still takes a generation or two for that kind of change to play out in society. While I think these themes are underused these days they don’t have to be explored.

What I really hope people get out of this is that there’s rich depth and meaning, symbolism and theme that you can find in exploring how your characters seek and believe in the transcendent. Much of our modern storytelling is immediate. Focused on survival, materialism and personal gain. Very little is about the transcendent or the timeless and if you’ve read anything here that inspires you to go out and write about those things then my job here is well done.

Lots accomplished this week but not much that I can talk about. Why? Find out in this week’s writing vlog!

A look at the development for my next fiction project!

Let me start by making myself clear. I do not now nor have I ever had any problem with the people of Bajor. I just think their religion is rubbish.

This is not because, like Starfleet, I think atheism is some kind of highly enlightened religion killing silver bullet. I find atheists as childish and silly as they find religion so there’s that. Instead my problem with the Bajoran religion is that it has very little of meaningful religion about it. The average person might conclude that is because the writers of the Star Trek franchise, being largely of an atheistic and secular bent, were incapable of creating meaningful religions but that actually isn’t true. Both the Klingons and the Vulcans possess identifiable beliefs of a religious nature.

Since the definition of religion is nebulous and difficult to pin down for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to define religion as a set of beliefs and practices intended to put adherents in contact with something beyond the material, something transcendent, be it a concept or an actual entity that transcends what we can see or touch. This is not quite the normative or philosophical definition. It’s just mine.

Klingons venerate a great teacher known as Kahless the Unforgettable who set out the Klingon code of honor while uniting much of the planet via conquest. Then he set out on a long journey and promised he’d return and they could find him if they waited at a star in the sky. (Klingons of the time were aware of space travel although were not spacefaring themselves.) They also have underworld myths, rituals that govern the coming of age and something like an ecclesiastical calendar. There are even gods in their stories, although apparently they’re all dead now. In short, Klingons have a code of conduct and a clear metaphysical structure it interacts with.

Vulcans have a strict regimen of meditation and logic they use to control their emotions. While there’s little in the way of the supernatural in their religion they do have many tenants similar to Buddhism, which in many forms is an atheistic way of viewing the world. Some might characterize it as pantheistic but that is a distinction without a difference in my book. What’s important is that Vulcans have distinct moral tenants, rituals, meditations and behaviors their beliefs demand of them. Because of volatile nature of their emotions, they must exercise self control at all times. Logic is their key to this.

The Vulcan philosophy is also key to participation in Vulcan society – Vulcans who ignore the strictures of the logical life are ostracized, to the point where there’s a whole splinter race of them called Romulans. The Vulcan philosophy doesn’t meet the modern conception of a supernatural belief system. But that conception is just that – modern. In its function and way of looking at the world logic takes the place of traditional deific authority and the system is, in all other ways, religious.

Many stories about Klingons and Vulcans have nothing to do with these beliefs but many others put their beliefs, rituals and behaviors at the center of the story. While several major stories about Bajorans put Bajoran myth in the center we rarely get an idea of what kinds of behaviors or moral foundations underpin their religion. At most it seems to involve community bonding and ritual to give a structure to life and create disciplined thinking. That’s all well and good but organized sports can do the same.

We’re not going to dig too deep into how organized sports might serve as a religion for the modern era right now. Maybe in the future.

The problem with this approach to religion in stories is that it just becomes a placeholder for community cohesion. When the Prophets (the venerated figures in Bajoran religion) are invoked they don’t symbolize or stand for anything. It just refers to the things the Bajorans hold in common. By the same token, the Pah Wraiths, the evil counterpart to the Prophets, are just a group of snidely whiplash villains, snickering in the shadows as they plan to overthrow Bajor and destroy the universe as we know it.

Unlike Klingons and Vulcans, there is no clear pattern of behavior we can measure Bajorans by. Klingons and Vulcans exist in a constant state of tension between their culture, their beliefs and the wants and needs of their immediate concerns and circumstances. We see this more in stories about Klingons. They grapple with the meeting between their sense of honor, particularly honor through conquest and victory, and the contrary standards of other civilizations in the galaxy. Klingons often compromise their lust for battle in order to uphold their loyalty, or vice versa. Who makes what compromises and when helps us understand the essentials of their characters, what they prioritize and what their goals are.

Unlike the Klingons, the Vulcans have a pretty easy time integrating with the desires and methods of other groups of people. It’s not that Vulcans don’t understand hypocrisy and emotional behavior, they just suppress it. So they are quite capable of adapting to the behaviors of other species. The problem is one of attitude. Vulcans are dispassionate and detached as a matter of course, subordinating all their behaviors to the all encompassing power of logic and that can rub people the wrong way. Especially when the logical solution to a problem is unethical by some standards.

Bajorans don’t have these kinds of easily understood points of tension built into their culture and that is exactly because their religion is devoid of meaning or substance. Instead religion is presented as the point of tension. The writers of Star Trek are entirely blind to the fact that any philosophy that encompasses understanding the nature of life, the universe, good and evil, and how we should live as a result of these things is religious in nature. We can’t compare or contrast a religion without some of those tenants to work from.

Unfortunately religion in media is presented more and more through a Bajoran lens. It’s just a totem we hold up to try and bind a community together and unite them, not a series of principles that inform everything else in life. In fairness, that’s also how people have come to view religion in modern, Western society. The problem is that view of religion is so shallow it may as well not exist. Indeed, we see that culture largely ignores religion now, at least the things it calls religion. But, as I’ve just discussed with the philosophies of the Klingons and Vulcans, I don’t think that leaves us with no religions. We’re just blind to religion now.

That has impacts on both storytelling and living and a good writer has to be aware of both. I’m going to discuss both in the next couple of weeks and I’ll be referring back to this post frequently so stay tuned. In the mean time, I hope I’ve clearly articulated how I think our three big examples show the strengths and shortcomings of different aspects of religion in storytelling. Let me know if I can clarify anything or if you’d like to see more in the future.

A brief look at where we stand on various projects now that I’m back from vacation.

Talking short writing projects in today’s vlog!