Star Trek fan…

…buys Brooklyn Bridge.

It looked like a great deal through his rose-colored glasses.

Sorry, dude. But Roddenberry was a self-described secular humanist whose contempt for religion only grew as he got older and more pretentious about his status as a philosopher. In one script that never got produced, Jesus is a malevolent alien entity. In Who Watches the Watchers, we get this stirring peroration from Captain Picard which accurately reflects Roddenberry’s take on “religion” (all of it, except his own religion of Onward and Upward American Progress):

D’ja get that? Belief in the supernatural = superstition, ignorance, and fear. Period. All religion in the Star Trek Universe is firmly rooted in a pantheistic materialism. There are energy beings, not gods or angels. Transcendance is strictly forbidden. All intelligence is emergent from matter, not created by the mind of transcendent God. We can and will evolve into God, but we are accountable to no God who made us. Star Trek is a massive myth of Pride and is intractably hostile to Christianity. The whole point of Bread and Circuses is that Christianity is part of the natural evolution of a civilization (because all planets must follow the natural evolution of the human species to Gene Roddenberry’s lofty summit). It is not an instance of the supernatural breaking into history.