Analyzing a Star Trek original series episode from a gnostic perspective got me thinking about the show in general, and whether you could extend the gnostic Christian analogy even farther, or if another religious tradition would make more sense. I’m just sort of making this up on the fly though, and I bet somebody could do a better rendition with a bit more time and research.

My first stop was to look up the name “Kirk.” It happens to come from a surname meaning “Church”. James means “one who supplants.” The two together comprising the concept “one who supplants the Church,” seems to be fairly gnostic, although perhaps dismantling the church would be more in order. Also, this whole idea of him being a “supplanter” is pretty interesting in relation to the Star Trek “Prime Directive” of non-interference in alien cultures - which Kirk pretty regularly violated, showing his true nature as a supplanter.

Then there is the whole idea of looking at the Enterprise crew as messengers sent from above, who come down to various planets to help out, solve a problem or mystery, and get people to join this galactic Federation. I forget where, maybe in Radio Free Albemuth, Philip K. Dick puts forth a sort of similar idea with his whole divine alien intelligence thing - that there is a united network of universal consciousness which for some reason we have been broken off from. There are some echoes of this in his Tractates Cryptica Scriptura.

The other possibly useful analogy I thought of was Kirk & Spock as being a Jesus & Peter pair. The idea being here that Spock is more like Peter - ie, that the dogmatism of the Church is built on his more rigid interpretations of the free-form from-the-gut attitude of Jesus/Spock. Might be fun to go through and look at attributes of different crew members and see how they compare to other apostles.

Oh, one other thing I almost forgot. According to the fictional biography of Captain Kirk, he spent his youth on a planet called Tarsus IV. In the land of Biblical connections, this brings us to Paul of Tarsus, who is credited with writing and coordinating main portions of the New Testament.

A while ago I came across an essay which tried to link Star Trek Next Generation to the Kabbalah. Worth checking out. I tend to really like this whole process of trying to fit together two contrasting story-systems to see if there is anything more that can be learned about each one. I definitely think its especially worthwhile to do it with tv shows because these are the stories which we are truly immersed in. In a lot of ways, most of us are much more familiar with them than with any traditional religious system. (Here’s another example of this type of thinking with a few different sitcoms.)

I also found a brief interview with Judith Barad, who wrote a book called The Ethics of Star Trek which deals with the underlying message of the whole show. According to Barad, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was a humanist, and the show basically acts as a model of humanist thought and ethics. Here’s another review of her book.

If anybody knows of any other good info or thinks up any other good correlations between Star Trek and Religion, I’d love to check it out.