On sci-fi and religion

I am feeling spiritual. Like, "Praise the Maker!" kind of spiritual.

Translation: I am feeling nerdy like whoa, and wish to ponder sci-fi for a minute.

See, if you're really, really nerdy, you'd understand when I explained how I was referencing two different sci-fi gods in that one quote. But you'd would have had to have read Dune and seen Episode IV recently.

But I digress. I was vaguely sort of interested in mumbling (virtually) about religions in sci-fi, and why they can't just, you know, offer peace and hope and shit. Instead, they've got to be half religion and half granter-of-mystical-power. I mean, belief in the Force is practically like believing in a high power, except no God that we've managed to come up with lets us choke people with our minds.

In the same way, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood is very much like a cult religion, but once again they're somehow granted mind-control power and also the ability to change their baby's sex in the womb. Or something. How else would one have the ability to choose which gender their child is? Sperm manipulation?

And the Fremen all but worship the giant sandworms, who bestow upon them the good drugs and hallucinogenic water that lets certain people gain the knowledge of all those other special people who came before them and drank successfully from the magical toxic water.

On the other hand, there's Star Trek, in which technology is the religion. Never mind about those backwater aliens. For those on the Enterprise, there appears to be very little belief in a higher power. I'm sure there's an interesting conclusion to be drawn from all this, but I'm not interested in drawing it. I just felt the need to post.

So I did. Obviously.