[warpedpoint]

So I’m going through a bunch of fandom tags so that I’ll actually have some stuff posted that isn’t my face, and halfway through the DS9 tag I see someone claiming that belief in the Prophets is portrayed as unhealthy or misguided, and it’s like… what? Really? We’re doing this?

I’ve literally had one series of Star Trek or another on my screen for most of my conscious hours now, just finishing DS9, and I never felt like they intended the Bajoran faith to be portrayed as unhealthy. Half the cast have ties to it in one way or another, and while some of their connections are unhealthy, such as Kai Winn’s (who honestly I felt was kind of a tragic character in her own way until she started going off the deep end and even then she at least tried to redeem herself) or Akorem Laan’s, who was ultimately faithful and a good person, just not fit to fill the role of the Emissary two hundred years out of time, there are so many with a very healthy relationship with the Prophets. Kira Nerys, Kai Opaka, Vedek Bareil Antos, even former Vedek Yarka’s relationship with the Prophets was good for him overall, even if he did let his own bias sway him at first.

And that’s just people that believe in the Prophets as Gods. There’s probably a wiki article and a half detailing Sisko’s shifting relationship with the Prophets, to say nothing of the mirrorverse’s Bareil Antos, and many more that I could go into if this wasn’t becoming a wall of text as it is. If anything, the one group that treats religion including the Bajoran Prophets with intense scepticism is Starfleet Headquarters, and they basically represent a definitive outsider, contrasting and creating conflict with Sisko’s position as a representative of both Starfleet and the Bajoran faith.

Anyway, it’s 4:22am, on my birthday, and I should probably sleep before morning, or try to. Apologies if this isn’t written terribly well. It just bothered me seeing such a complex thing as the portrayal of the Bajoran religion simplified to “unhealthy or misguided” when one of the key arcs of the show basically sings that religion and spirituality is far more complex than that.