Postscript

[brin_bellway]

(also, and I guess it's not fair to blame Ross for not thinking of this part because Zek kept it as quiet as possible: remember that time the Prophets brainwashed the leader of an interplanetary alliance into doing a 180 on his goals? you do *not* wanna piss off the Prophets.)

(and why are the Feds so reluctant to call them Prophets? local word for a local species, and it's not like it's inaccurate or overly worshipful, they *do* see the future, it's not like we're calling them *gods*)

Comments

[thedarlingone]

My immediate thought about the Prophets thing is... well, in the sort of zipfile version in which it exists inside my head it's "and Mohammed is his prophet", which definitely doesn't say what I mean. Trying to expand it coherently produces something like "American Christianity has this shibboleth where if you call someone a prophet you are doing all of (1) assigning them respect and (2) associating them with a divinity (3) whose authority you personally acknowledge". Which probably doesn't say everything I mean either, but... I can feel exactly why a Starfleet "there is no religion in space" admiral would refuse to call them Prophets, and it has to do directly with rejecting their claim on Ben as the Emissary, but I'm struggling to word it in a way that doesn't depend on that unconsciously Christian "everyone has the same connotations to this word that we do" background.

I mean, I'm happy to try to expand on it more if you're interested, but the best I can do for a short answer is that it skates way too close to calling them gods, in the particular Christian-not-Jewish way where you have to obey your gods without arguing. Also it probably ties to the more general insistence on using deadnames and such, "if I use your term for yourself I'm giving you a legitimacy I don't want". But "prophet" specifically is a super loaded term in this context.

Edit: I'm on my phone and trying to get ready for work, so not super coherent, but another thing I meant to say is that there's also a definite "us vs them" connotation. "Prophets" are inherently other. Jews have prophets, Muslims have prophets, "we" (American Christians / Federation admirals) don't have prophets. By just calling them "the Prophets", Ben is very much signaling subscription to the Bajoran view of the whole thing, at least compared to the proper behavior of a Starfleet admiral. And getting involved in the Other's worship rites, especially and specifically if not doing so would have bad economic or personal consequences, is Wrong and behavior unbefitting a Starfleet admiral / a good Christian.

I'm probably not being coherent at all, sorry. This is so clear on the partition where I still understand these things, but making it be words is hard.

[brin_bellway]

>>Also it probably ties to the more general insistence on using deadnames and such, "if I use your term for yourself I'm giving you a legitimacy I don't want".<<

Which reminds me of how, on a rewatch, that first-episode scene between Sisko and Picard is made especially awkward by the fact that Picard pronounces "Bajor" *with a Cardassian accent*.

(admittedly that might be the French in him coming out, French is *also* big on final-syllable stresses and pronouncing j as "zh", but like, he doesn't *usually* speak with a French accent)

Yeah, maybe it's the Jew or the liberal or both in me, but to me calling them Prophets is basically just "I acknowledge that this is what you are called, and for that matter that you have fairly clearly demonstrated the abilities for which you are named, and I might even go so far as to acknowledge that those abilities are pretty neat (though I promise not to try to exploit them because I saw what you did to the *last* guy who tried that)".

This stuff might also tie in with the way that...IIRC *nobody* on that station draws a distinction between "belief" and "worship". People ask each other "do you believe in the Prophets", and like, of *course* I believe the Prophets exist, they're right there, even if they don't directly interact with the corporeal world *much* they've done it enough to make their existence pretty clear. That doesn't mean I have to *worship* them.

(and this is all made more difficult on a Watsonian level by the ubiquitous use of translators, which the viewer is expected to ignore even when things like "translating the Cardassian word as the extremely misleading 'trial' when a closer term would be 'denouement'" happen.)

And it does kind of seem like it's *not* purely a translation issue, that they actually don't distinguish between these *concepts* and therefore people who don't want to worship the Prophets feel like they ought to downplay the Prophets' existence no matter how stupid and/or dangerous it is to do so.

(and maybe *that's* the Jew in me, too: it's been a *long* damn time since Jews were henotheists, but even "this is a thing our ancestors used to believe millennia ago" is enough to give you the *concept* of believing in gods without worshipping them)

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If you can think of a good way to explain in more depth or coherency I'd be interested to hear it, but I think you've done pretty well so far.

[thedarlingone]

’This stuff might also tie in with the way that...IIRC *nobody* on that station draws a distinction between "belief" and "worship".’

Yes! That’s another very Christiany thing about the handling of the whole Prophets storyline. Specifically Puritan-influenced, too, or fundamentalist-influenced? Something very specifically USian. Everything has to fit into the overarching cosmology - I’m thinking of how my sisters and I used to speculate about fairies and ghosts and the Bermuda Triangle, you know, stuff that sits at the intersection of scientific inquiry and anti-skepticism, and if my bio-incubator overheard us we were in for a lecture on how the only spiritual entities we were allowed to acknowledge as existing (not that she put it that way) were God, angels, devils, and human souls, all of which had to be strictly associated with Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. No wandering spirits, no neutral manifestations, only the good, the evil, and the “pray for me to release me from torment”.

Uh. That got away from me. Point is, that sort of “fairies are DECEPTIONS OF SATAN because that’s the only available slot for them and if you speculate otherwise you are Endangering your Soul” attitude is what that reminds me of. Like sure, you’d expect Starfleet to have a concept of “energy beings who are involved in our treaty negotiations” after that whole thing with the Klingons back in TOS, but nope, if you acknowledge the Prophets’ existence you are assumed to be involved in their worship. Honestly, thinking out loud here, I wonder if that’s an oddly subtle marker of the radicalization of the religious right / their gain in mainstream power over that thirty-year gap? The ‘60s were full of sci-fi energy creatures not being worshipped, TOS specifically had a bunch. DS9 didn’t go in for the “we have all evolved beyond religion” attitude of TOS (which was also a deeply ‘60s SF thing, is my impression), but it skewed in the other direction and made that assumption that in order to *not* worship a particular deity you have to reject its entire existence. I mean the monotheism/atheism false dichotomy there is a pretty prevalent assumption in most post-Enlightment philosophy I’m aware of (I had to google “henotheism”), but I’m thinking you could definitely argue a shift in cultural attitudes kind of... showing up there, in the ways the two shows handled their near-omnipotent energy beings.