starfleetashell: (padd // malagraphic)
Ensign Beckett Mariner ([personal profile] starfleetashell) wrote in [community profile] ph_logs 2025-01-11 06:32 am (UTC)

Mariner attends the Midnight Mass, largely from an anthropological perspective. They don't really...do this so much in her time; a lot of humans decided to go the Reddit nu-atheist route once First Contact was made and decided that aliens disproved God, or whatever. A lot of people lost faith in the wake of World War 3. But she knows people in Starfleet who still follow Earth religions, and she doesn't follow any herself but she respects sincere belief. Not like she was going to assert to Shaxs or Kira that the Prophets are extradimensional wormhole aliens; that was something a lot of Bajorans had easily incorporated into their beliefs, but a lot hadn't, too.

So, she goes. She's read about it before, seen holos, even gone to recreations in holosuites of different religious beliefs during a Religious Studies course back in the Academy. She'd been to Bajoran services back on DS9, because even though she didn't believe in the Prophets as gods, the community and reassurance during the most hellish days of the Dominion War was sometimes all she had to cling to.

She follows everyone else's lead, supplementing that with her hazy recollections from the Academy courses. She doesn't pray or take the host; it would feel dishonest. She's met beings people would mistake for gods and told them to fuck off. Probably wouldn't win her many points with the Christian capital-G God.

She loiters at the end of the service, willing to talk to Mulcahy if he's available.

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