Kathryn wrote:
I don't really think Blake has studied religion at all seriously... he's a man of his time in that respect, absorbing Federation attitudes unconciously.
I agree that Blake is not religious, but he may have studied religious principles of the past and translated them into corresponding rational terms (e.g., if people in the past thought God would punish them for taking vengeance, it may have been their primitive way of expressing the feeling that vengeance is morally wrong). In this way, he could have embraced some of these principles without actually becoming religious.
Though it's a bit hard to know what the Federation's educational stance is on religion -- yes, religion is illegal in the Federation, but religion, being at its heart an idea, is impossible to stamp out, so they've got to be fighting it somehow. Now, would they be fighting it with censorship (e.g. Gan not knowing what a church was) or with anti-religious propaganda? (e.g. "faith is the capacity to believe what you know isn't true") Or both?
I don't know the exact answer to your question, but I agree the need for religion would be very difficult to erradicate. Mircea Elliade calls man 'homo religiosus', referring to our deeply ingrained need to impose some organising principle and some sort of meaning upon the Universe. Vico defined myth as the primitive man's attempt to project the structures of his mind upon his chaotic experience of the natural forces. Peter Shaffer's Equus (one of Gareth Thomas's theatrical roles) is an excellent and profound study of the human need for passionate worship.
I suppose the totalitarian regimes misuse this psychological need for their purpose, for instance, to inspire the worship of the dictator's 'father-figure', such as Stalin-worship or Big Brother worship in 1984. (On a less serious note, Huxley in Brave New World proposed Ford as the deity of the modern age. 'Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun'). Servalan, however, is not such a figure, or at least we don't have any evidence of Servalan-worship in the series. (Although someone in Rumours says that 'for many people, Servalan is the Federation'.)
'We are the Priests of Power', O'Brian says in 1984. He derives his feeling of power from his identification with the immortal entity of the Party. People can be destroyed, but the Party will exist for ever. Perhaps we could assume that some such feeling is inspired by the authorities in B7, for instance, the belief in the immortality of the Federation and the invincibility of its military?
N.