The Star Trek series began in 1966, when I was four years old.  In my home in a small town in Indiana, I grew up watching our black and white tube television set.  I became a “trekkie” with Captain Kirk, Spock, Scottie, and McCoy. If someone held up his hand with only his middle fingers separated, I knew that meant, “Live long and prosper.”  It isn’t unusual in this country.  Many watch and read fantasy and science fiction.

I’m not endorsing Star Trek or even the genre of science fiction.  I lay down a full disclaimer.  I would argue for disinterest as the superior position.

Star Trek shows a naturalistic world view.  It imagines that everything came about by accident and evolved, producing whole other galaxies full of living creatures and intelligence.  Having progressed in technology to the extent that people can travel at light speed to get to those galaxies, the science fiction of Star Trek says this is how good things should be.  None of this mirrors a Christian worldview, which is the only true one.

Christianity, of course, reveals the best possible outcome for people.  God wants people to have it and it could not be better.

In the Star Trek imagination, the future sees very evolved, sophisticated people visit less evolved ones.  They study them like scientists, almost like humans watching an ant farm.  The speculation is that this is bound to happen.  All these different creatures evolved in their separate locations.

When the main Star Trek characters visit, they cannot interfere with development or evolution.  Some of you reading know the law.  They call it the “prime directive,” which “prohibits Starfleet personnel and spacecraft from interfering in the normal development of any society, and mandates that any Starfleet vessel or crew member is expendable to prevent violation of this rule.”

While traveling, my wife and I used a laundromat (also called a launderette some places).  At one location, while I went to get cash for change, she started into evangelism with a woman, who was a secular humanist.  I didn’t hear the first half of the conversation, but the woman was arguing against Christianity interfering with indigenous people.  Why should Christians see their point of view superior to tribes with subsistence living and their accompanying religions?

I had walked in to hear the woman say this to my wife.  I smiled to myself, because it sounded like the prime directive.  Just leave people alone.  Just because they’re different doesn’t mean they’re inferior.  I also recognize this as multi-culturalism.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:

While the term has come to encompass a variety of normative claims and goals, it is fair to say that proponents of multiculturalism find common ground in rejecting the ideal of the “melting pot” in which members of minority groups are expected to assimilate into the dominant culture. Instead, proponents of multiculturalism endorse an ideal in which members of minority groups can maintain their distinctive collective identities and practices.

The prime directive says “don’t assimilate” the minority culture.  This philosophy further associates with “cultural relativism.”  Foundational to this thinking is the absence of objective truth, goodness, and beauty.  With cultural relativism, one people cannot say that they are better than some other people in their beliefs, practices, and aesthetics.

If there is objective truth, goodness, and beauty, which there is, you help a culture when you intervene with the truth, goodness, and beauty.  There is one God, no other.  He is also the judge of the world.  Every person, whatever culture he’s in, will face the same God.

The Bible teaches the polar opposite of the prime directive.  Something is better than something else.  One culture is superior to another.

Multiculturalism, the prime directive, or cultural relativism reject the truth.  Satan wants men going down the broad way unaware that it sends them to eternal death.  They think they’re fine, because no one can say with certainty what the truth is.

Cultures are different dependent upon their relationship to the truth.  The closer to the truth, the better they are. If they aren’t following the truth, someone can help them by preaching the truth to them.  God requires the violation of the prime directive.