Krista’s going to hate me for this, but the whole second half of the play I couldn’t stop thinking about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. I did consult our mutual friend Lily, my rare equal in knowledge of Star Trek and also in attendance, and she concurred that I wasn’t totally off-base. The whole intersection is no mere matter of trekkie trivia; it goes straight to the center of the intersection of freedom and suffering and faith and all that.

The relevant character in Phantom Band is Camille, the mysterious blonde from England, with the Queen’s accent, who takes people to the forest and plays them her beautiful siren song while they shout out all the things they don’t want to hear, Primal Scream-style:?the junk their parents and the mean football players are always saying to make them feel crappy. Afterward, they feel much better, but they’re also zombie-like; they don’t really hear much of anything and just keep saying, “What?” They’re free. Or are they?

Star Trek V is widely considered the worst of the original-cast Star Trek movies, not least because it was directed by William Shatner himself. Over the years, though, as I’ve dutifully watched it many, many times, I’ve come to like it more and more. Maybe that’s because it’s the “religion” one; the climax of the movie is going to the center of the galaxy to visit “God.” Or maybe because it includes the singing of my favorite song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” while Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are eating bourbon and beans over a campfire in Yellowstone.

But none of that’s important here, really. The relevant character in Star Trek V is Sybok, Spock’s long-lost brother. Rather than being a typical emotion-repressing Vulcan, Sybok left his homeworld, embraced his emotions, and became a cult leader. The way he gets cultists is much what Camille does in the woods: he makes people face their pain. Once they do, with his special formula, they become brainwashed and follow his orders. Here’s Sybok showing off his trick on Dr. McCoy:

This is, of course, a familiar feature of religious experience. Buddhism begins with the recognition of suffering in the world and shows it to be illusion. Christianity begins with the repentance of sin and ends with an executed savior. Scientology starts by telling you you’re stressed and ends with—TBA. Psychoanalysis begins on the couch and never ends. Simply confronting these pains at least somewhat more directly than we do in normal, repressive life is so shocking and cleansing that it can change the course of a person’s life for good. It can deliver pure, unshakeable beliefs about how the world works. The price of deliverance is conviction. It’s a simple, but really quite weird fact about human nature, and both Star Trek V and Phantom Band remind us of this.

Is facing your pain and getting it zapped away really such a great thing? I suppose it might be. But with Sybok’s zombies in Star Trek V we’re meant to see something familiar—in the kind of heavy-handed allegory so typical of the franchise, only sharpened by Shatner’s signature lack of subtlety. Maybe you’re meant to see the born-again relative who has figured everything out and wants you to figure it out exactly the same way. Or the suicide cults that folks were all so afraid their kids would join in the ’70s. Or maybe it’s something in yourself, I don’t know. But you know what I mean.

At the end of Phantom Band, the kids realize that they’d rather face the hard stuff in real life than keep being zombies. So they zap out of the trance by shouting?to themselves all the painful stuff they’d been la-la-ing out with Camille’s angelic music.

In another striking parallel, that’s almost exactly what Captain Kirk lands on in Star Trek V, with the line from the movie that fans end up quoting to each other probably more than any other: “I need my pain!” It comes a bit later in the same scene we saw earlier.

Dammit, Bones, you’re a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. [If] we lose them we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away, I need my pain!

That’s good stuff, isn’t it? Those lines have nourished me a lot over the years. There’s a freedom of its own sort in giving up the hope of pain disappearing like zap. It’s inescapably us. And maybe your pain can drive you, too, to being a daring, reckless, but always successful and heroic starship captain like Captain Shatn—I mean Kirk.

Today at Religion Dispatches I’ve got a review of the new book by Steve Fuller, a rather audacious and controversial philosopher of science. Though himself a secular humanist, he’s out to show that science, past and present, owes pretty much everything to the theological imagination—in particular, the Christian one. As much as there is truth to this—truth rarely appreciated as it deserves to be—sometimes even I have to draw the line. Not everything is about religion:

[T]here are proximate causes other than theology on hand for science’s development and sustenance. Europe and North America in the latter half of the second millennium had social arrangements, natural resources, habits of mind, and geopolitical competition that make for satisfying just-so stories too; only the most theologically self-confident would chalk it all up to religion. The globalization of science now underway, particularly as more and more important research takes place in non-Christian countries like China and Japan and by their nationals working in the West, a totally theology-centric narrative seems less and less plausible.

But even an anecdotal survey of what ways of thinking uphold the everyday habits of science today don’t quickly draw one’s mind to religion, nor do they necessarily stand in opposition to it. As in any profession, there are professionals competing for advancement and respect by trying to outdo each other in highly specialized contests, accumulating accomplishments that outsiders can’t begin to comprehend. All this depends on particular personality traits which, combined with lots of discipline and practice, amount to tremendous facility in the intellectual and technological tools of a given field. It’s paid for by private and public agencies which, in turn, steer research priorities. Science has also concocted its own narratives that serve some of the functional roles that religious ones otherwise might; I wonder what would have become of Fuller’s book had it focused not on theology but on science fiction, from Bishop Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone to Star Trek.

That would be nice, but I’ve never really bought it. To be honest, I don’t even think it would be nice. All we’d have to do is follow the correct kernel of our religions and we’d be golden forever, end of story. So much of the interesting, complex, and messy stuff that makes learning about religions and about people so engrossing might peel away in the name of unity. And often, when such universal perennialism gets wheeled out, it turns out to be in fact a surreptitious assertion of a particular tradition, to which all the others become subservient.

But when Karen Armstrong, the British dean of comparative-religion-for-the-people, claims that all religions are really about compassion, when she goes on to promulgate a “Charter for Compassion,” and when TED throws its connections and tech savvy behind her, it’s hard to be too much of a curmudgeon. Sure, such things have come and gone again and again in history—how often have we heard calls for World Peace in Our Time?—but no less are we probably still responsible for giving it another go. And if a bit of fascinating religious mayhem has to be quieted in the process, so be it. There will still be science fiction.

That said, I’m glad to have had the chance to interview Karen Armstrong at The Immanent Frame. What she proposes is certainly a brave effort to mobilize her years of studying and writing into action, into a movement. It also represents an important example of activism and organizing from precisely the spiritual-but-not-religious vantage point that is supposedly able to do neither.

NS: Do you anticipate that the Charter will eventually translate into meaningful social change?

KA: All religious teaching must issue in practical action. This is something that has become very clear to me during the last twenty years, which I have devoted to the study of world religions. The doctrines and stories of faith make no sense at all unless they are translated into action. This is one of the essential themes of my latest book, The Case for God, which was being written at the same time as we were composing the Charter. We were all convinced that somehow the Charter must be a call to action. There was no point in us all embracing one another on the day of the launch if there would be no practical follow up. We need compassion—the ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, to “experience with” the other—in politics, social policy, finance, education, and media. Unless we can learn to treat all nations and all peoples as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we are unlikely, in these days of global terror, to have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.

Read more at The Immanent Frame.

Religion Dispatches

Imagine this: in the middle of the day, all at once, a sea of suits pours out onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. With them come as many somber faces, cast down, but bearing a glint of tranquility not often seen in that neighborhood. No press conference was scheduled, but reporters descend, and something like one materializes out of the crowd, centered around the chief executives of the top investment banks. They, we learn, arranged this together the night before in lieu of their usual cognac and cigars.

It has been a year now since the American people rescued the financial industry with gargantuan loans and benevolent takeovers. The Dow is on the upswing again, and some of the biggest banks have paid back what they borrowed. But the executives know that, even as their fortunes turn, employment nationwide continues to plummet. People all around the globe have fallen into poverty as a result of the crisis that their markets engineered.

Now is the time, they declare, for a change.

Continue reading at RD.

Am I asking too much? It is, after all, just a sci-fi show. Not really. At least in retrospect, 1991’s The Undiscovered Country was a political masterpiece for the end of the Cold War—a tale of reconciliation between two long-warring societies, of old warriors learning to overcome their hatreds. Or the sometimes cheesy Voyage Home from 1986, in which the villain turned out to be a benevolent force of nature bearing an environmentalist message. Or even William Shatner’s The Final Frontier, which made a somewhat bumbling, but partly effective, try at taking on God. Another recent Slate article, as well, pointed to the poignant portrayal of torture in a latter-day The Next Generation episode. The latest aspires to none of these things, at least none that I can tell. Admittedly, I have learned, these films get deeper with age.

Maybe I was too hard on it, but maybe not. You decide!

This gray afternoon, with a friend, I went to the U.S.S. Intrepid, the Essex-class aircraft carrier-turned-museum on the west side of Manhattan. Dubbed “The Most Inspiring Adventure in America,” it’s an opportunity to tour through half a century of clever combat airplanes and nautical contrivance. I knew them all pretty well from childhood. The planes, the missiles, the bombs, the protocols. How unsettling to see those elegant monsters on the carrier deck there, against the backdrop of Midtown, in a quiet and peaceful retirement.

When the Intrepid museum reopened last year, several other friends of mine were there protesting. I was going to be but at the last minute wasn’t able. I wanted to. So I felt uneasy the whole time, paying my student admission fee (with an expired ID), to this grand monument to American warfare. And how could we not make a monument? The machines are amazing. And much more pressing is the courage, the lives, the tiniest details of the people who fought in them.

After that I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with yet another friend. With the previews came Kid Rock’s promotional video for the National Guard, mixing rock ‘n’ roll with stock cars with benevolent, courageous soldiers. It’s called “Warrior.” (More on the implications of that term.)

On the one hand it saddened me. It glorifies thoughtless belligerence. He sings, “So don’t tell me who’s wrong or right when liberty starts slipping away.” And there’s a picture of a column of Humvees rolling through the desert with machine guns mounted atop. It’s a tragic contradiction. Liberty, we are to understand, is something so unmistakable that one no longer needs to distinguish right from wrong when soldiering in its name. That’s no liberty I’ll recognize, and certainly not one I’ll fight for.

But the propaganda had its charms as well. There are scenes of soldiers helping where a natural disaster struck. And there’s one moment where some gun-toting soldiers stop to make friends with brown-skinned kids in a dusty village. Kid Rock sings, “They call me ready to provide relief and help, I’m wherever you need me to be.” I could sign on for that! As long as the weird requirement about tossing out ethical reflection about the use of force in the name of “liberty” weren’t part of the deal.

In Benjamin Button itself, there’s a war scene. Benjamin’s on the crew of a little tugboat that has been commissioned by the Navy during World War II. There’s a machine gun mounted up top, and that’s it. Suddenly, they find themselves face to face with a German U-boat that just sunk a transport full of people. Bodies float in the water. What do they do? They charge the U-boat. They ram it. In the process, nearly everyone on board gets killed by enemy machine guns. It’s an absurd and gruesome event of course, but also an incredible act of sacrifice, and one done without hesitation.

These three pieces of glorified war cannot be taken at their word. Each, in its way, leaves the most horrible, and at least equally essential, parts of its story untold. But there is truth in each too, in even the honor it seeks to portray.

Benjamin Button has a lot of beautiful moments that tug at the heartstrings to the point of being crassly manipulative. One of these is at the beginning. There’s a story told about a clockmaker who builds a clock for a train station in the years after World War I. When the clock is unveiled, he reveals that it turns backward. The reason, he announces, is to turn back the clock on all the boys we lost in the war, including his own son, so that they might have full lives after all. And then, there is a brief scene, played in reverse, of a charge in that Great War: out from the explosion that kills a uniformed boy back, back to his last moments of life, back home, back to his leaving his family. None of it had to happen. None of it should have.

There must be a way to honor such sacrifices as war brings out in people while abhorring the pointless insanity that occasioned it, abhorring it so completely that it can never possibly happen again.

Herzog, complete with haunting German accent, talks a lot in this meandering film, yet its subject is mainly still and unspeakable. It came to be because of a grant from the National Science Foundation, which brings artists to the continent’s scientific bases in order to return some record of them to civilization. My aunt, Lita Albuquerque, was there at the same time as Herzog for artistic purposes of her own. The mission might seem impossible, or at least it should: bring inexact beauty to a scientific penal colony.

The sounds Herzog puts the images to, often, are religious—Russian Orthodox chanting was my guess. Thus the frozen landscapes and underwater, under-ice expanses become cathedrals. He calls them that outright. The people we meet in the film each bring their own interpretations. A vehicle-driving mystic quotes the Buddhist teacher Alan Watts. One morose scientist feeds off of classic sci-fi. And a physicist speaks of neutrinos as invisible gods.

Apocalypticism unites most among them, breathed in whichever flavor. Driving it is the obvious impermanence of human habitation there, the one great mass of earth where even our ingenuity can’t sustain us, unaided, for long. Antarctica, also, is ground zero for global climate change, and the researchers watch it unfold daily. How long before that certain transience envelops the whole world?

As one inhabitant after another talks with Herzog about these things, another pattern arises: the silence is so deep in Antarctica (or is it the only continent so alien we should say “on”?) that it can wake you up at night.

Herzog claims more for the film than it accomplishes, but the co-incidence of the penguin and the people is enough. How different is the hobbling bird’s “disorientation” from the systems of belief that drive us to the planet’s bottom? In this first colony of artificiality onto a natural world, it becomes clear how perfectly natural our artifice is.

The trailer for the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie came out last week. My RSS feed lit up, as they say, like a Christmas tree. No fewer than three Facebook messages arrived to inform me of the fact (from not-trekkie friends who are sympathetic to my plight). “It raped my childhood” was a popular reaction on the blogs. With each day, more trickles out—scene screenings, rumors, interviews, hints. The movie doesn’t even open till May. We’re given six months to stew in anticipation or dread.

The trailer starts with a young, buck-toothed James Tiberius Kirk on a farm in Iowa. Something’s happening. He jumps into a car—yes, a car, as in a 20th century car, when this is supposed to be the future! Rrrg. He tears off in it, chased by a motorcycle cop, and is about to run over a cliff (in Iowa?) when he jumps out and grabs onto the ledge, narrowly escaping doom, etc. Thank goodness at least the cop’s motorcycle levitates. After that, a bunch of starship action scenes with young Kirk and young Spock flash before our eyes, and then it’s over. Horrible.

Really? What’s so wrong about that? Let me try to explain.

More than anything else quite has, Star Trek dictated the way that I see the world. My metaphysics (resplendent science), anthropology (good and frenetically curious at heart), and eschatology (technology will make everything awesome), are all, in the main, Roddenberrian. Gene Roddenberry was the L.A. cop-turned screenwriter who invented the first Star Trek series and midwifed The Next Generation into being just before his passing. That was the one, with Jean-Luc Picard and the helm, that did me in. Specifically, seasons 3 thru 6 1/2.

It hit at a very formative moment, some lucky sweet-spot between 4th and 6th grade, when puberty must have been all in the brain because nothing had happened yet in the body. But as soon as something did happen in the body, I dropped Captain Picard like a dead cat and picked up the more chick-friendly electric guitar. One day, I actually went to Goodwill and gave away every last bit of my hundreds of dollars in merchandise.

Gene “the Great Bird of the Galaxy” Roddenberry died in 1991. By ’95, his beatific vision of the future had fallen into total disrepair. At first, I liked that fact that with each passing year there were more space battles and more interspecies wars. But then there started to be money. Picard always said humans were beyond that. The third series, Deep Space Nine wore on, it became clear that they came at the cost of everything good and true, in my book. Two other series, Voyager and Enterprise, stunk. The last full-length picture was the worst movie ever made.

For a time, I was hopeful. A few weeks ago, Abrams was quoted saying, “It was important to me that optimism be cool again.” But soon it became clear what that meant. “This is a treatment of Star Trek with action and comedy and romance and adventure, as opposed to a rather talky geekfest.” No, thank you. Spoken like a closet Star Wars fan. Confirmed: “[Abrams] was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie ‘that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.'”

I had to come to a realization: the brand is a lie. Or the franchise, or the saga, or whatever. Probably they all are.

Let me tell you: I’ve been to a few Star Trek conventions in my day. Wander through them, and it is plain to see when each person caught the bug. Why? Because they’re dressed like a character of whatever period makes them feel warm and fuzzy. ’60s Kirk or ’80s Kirk? Data or Spock? We’re all umbrella-ed under this single Star Trek package, but each carrying separate experiences. Now, I want to finally accept that those can never quite come again, whatever the promises of Paramount Pictures or of fan-made episodes.

It’s like Spock once said: “If we were to assume these whales as ours to do with as we please, we would be just as guilty as those who caused their extinction.” (The whales are our experiences, big as whales, in the aquariums of our lives.)

I can’t possess or re-possess what Star Trek has done; it possesses me. I can only let it get worse with equanimity and protect my childhood from the inevitable rapists.

As a special for readers of The Row Boat, I’m pleased to present a hand-written “transcript” of my “interview” with the great ancient astronaut theorist Zecharia Sitchin: the notes he scribbled at the bottom of the questions I mailed him. I’m very grateful for his response, though unfortunately it didn’t provide me with enough to merit a mention in the article. To view the full-size .jpg, click here or on the thumbnail.

I go just bananas for the Mesopotamian publishing techniques—clay cylinders, stamps, inscribed reliefs, and tiny tablets. The efforts that made them simply cry out for the power of words.

Before that, I wandered through the Topkapi Palace, which housed Ottoman sultans from Mehmet the Conqueror to Atatürk. It didn’t blow me away like the archaeology—ostentatious riches aren’t my cup of tea. But there was one really memorable part, in addition to the view of the Bosphorus: a reliquary of holy objects. And you thought the Vatican’s collection of “true cross” fragments (about enough wood to populate a forest) was ambitious. Here we have Moses’s staff, King David’s sword, Joseph’s turban, Muhammad’s footprint, and even a vessel used by Abraham. The museum dutifully labeled each with dates appropriate to the respective character. In the gallery, Qur’anic chanting was carried by speakers. Turns out, at the end there’s a man chanting into a microphone, sitting at a geometrical black desk that looks like it came from the bridge of a Romulan Warbird. The sound was beautiful of course.

One more thing: last night there was a cat playing in the lights at the Hagia Sophia.