SF Religion in TOS?

[Peregrin Toker]

Romulans are a little like the world war II germans in believing their race is superior, would that be considered their religon?

So believed the British Empire, the ancient Hebrews, the Indo-European nomads of the Neolithic and the Spaniards during the conquest of South America. The Romulans, if anyone, are modelled upon the Roman Empire.

[FaxModem1]

But none of those empires killed those they considered inferior. The Romulans and Germans did that with their retarded and handicapped and so on.

[Patrick Ogaard]

But none of those empires killed those they considered inferior. The Romulans and Germans did that with their retarded and handicapped and so on.

Actually, many of those peoples did do exactly that.

Deliberate exposure of infants and children deemed defective or inferior was an established right of heads of household throughout much of Greek and Roman classical history. These rejects were often placed along the outside of the town or city walls, where merchants would pick up those they thought likely to survive and fetch a decent price as slaves.

The same is almost certainly true of the Indo-European nomads, for the simple reason that nomadic societies have no ability to support those unable to pull their own weight. That's what the scene from "A Man Called Horse" is based on, the one in which the old woman whose grown son dies chops off her own fingers and becomes a homeless person while inside the camp. Typical nomad treatment of the old that have become a burden has historically been for the old person to remain behind when the group breaks camp and moves on. The old-fashioned eskimo response was for those who felt themselves too old and creaky to be encouraged to take a long night-time walk into the cold and then sit down in some convenient spot and fall asleep. It's unlikely the Indo-European nomads followed a different pattern.

The British, the Spaniards and the ancient Hebrews may have had more tolerance for the infirm in their own ranks, but certainly they were not particularly soft on those they were using to support their own standard of living. That applies just as much to the French, Germans, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabs, Turks, and pretty much everyone else who ever managed to gain the upper hand over others and enslaved nations or large portions of ethnicities. The useless slaves are culled if they become a nuisance.

The nasty thing about the Nazi methodology is, very specifically, that it was being carried out against its own population, and there was no actual necessity of the sort that drives primitive nomads. It was a combination of mean vindictiveness, crackpot philosophy and science, and pedestrian evil. The victims were not, after all, a bunch of unwashed, ignorant, easily disregarded savages from the butt end of nowhere, but the children of honest Germans, part of the civilized Western world, as well as gypsies, gays, hookers, Jehovah's Witnesses, socialists, and Jews. Ironically, of course, rather disproportionate numbers of German Jews of the time, based in part on their strong academic traditions, had served as officers, often highly decorated officers, during WW1. Also, had they applied the standard uniformly, half the Nazi senior leadership would have been locked in a van and been killed by automobile exhaust gases, the club-footed Goebbels leading the pack.

The sterilization of those deemed defective, to make sure the defectives did not reproduce, on the other hand, that was essentially universal practice in the first half of the 1900s. Practically every civilized nation, from Sweden to the US, had programs to more or less systematically sterilize their institutionalized defectives. In some places, these programs continued well into the late 1900s. Eugenics programs were cutting edge science in the early 1900s.

Getting back to the Romulan subject, even the execution of Tasha Yar is perfectly in keeping with Roman tradition. In the most extreme of Roman tradition, the father, as head of household, held the power of life and death over all family members. A son remained effectively the slave of his father regardless of the son's age. So long as the father still lived, the son owed his father obedience, and it was perfectly within a father's rights to kill disrespectful or lazy offspring, or sell them. Tasha trying to remove herself and her husband's child from the control of the head of household was completely unacceptable behavior. Sela's alerting of the household to the betrayal, on the other hand, was an admirable display of loyalty to the head of household.

[Kurgan]

Good points.

I forgot about the followers of Vaal in "The Apple."

As pointed out, the incidents of human religion in TOS are pretty limited, compared to the (usually "bad cult" or "primitives hoodwinked by advanced aliens/AI") styles of religion practiced by other beings in the galaxy they encounter.