Headscratchers / Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Bajorans

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Bajoran famine?

Its mentioned several times in the early episodes that Bajor is in the midst of a famine, people are starving to death, and farming/producing enough food to feed the population appears to be a big, ongoing issue. Why? Food replicators are a thing, and the series even mentions "industrial replicators". It seems like a half a dozen Federation starships parked in orbit, replicating and beaming down supplies, could have the entire population fed overnight and stocked with enough to last years over the course of just a couple weeks(don't tell me they can't replicate canned soup or some other long shelf-life rations). It doesn't make a lot of sense that people should be starving to death, trying to grow food out of the dirt when replicators exist.

• Two answers, the first is that the Federation and Starfleet do not have half a dozen starships to spare right now, they are still recovering from Wolf 359 as well as the Romulans constantly testing them. The Federation has vast resources, but they are not inexhaustible. The second is that, as noted several times, the Bajoran Provisional Government doesn't want too much direct help. It is a point of pride to them that they are the ones who feed their own people, especially given their past as an agriculturally focused culture. It is also said that the Cardassians first showed up as "offering aid" and gradually insinuated themselves into complete power, and they worry about the Federation's aid coming with similar strings and plans. They want help building the resources to recover, but fear that immediate aid will just get them hooked by the Federation. It is the old "give a man a fish" dilemma.

Bajor the theocracy?

In "Shakaar", Kai Winn is the sole contender for the post of First Minister for several weeks, until the titular rebel decides to join in. It's meant to foreshadow the sort of person Winn will show herself to be, but wait. She's the Kai and running for First Minister? That would be like the Pope running for a Presidency, and very illegal in some countries (particularly ones with an established church/state separation). She talks about trying to enhance Bajor's chances with The Federation, but would they be cool with a system that allows such a thing to happen?

• The separation of church and state is usually de jure in nation-states that have a high percentage of religious minorities. And it's to protect the rights of the minority. If the U.S. changed to a reactionary Christian theocracy, it would infringe upon the rights of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindi, atheists, agnostics and so on that live in the U.S.— a not-insignificant percentage. (Note: I am not interested in getting into a debate about the American system of government; this is merely to illustrate a point). In other countries where the separation of church and state is far less pronounced, the overwhelming majority of its citizens tend to follow that religion; some countries even make it a crime to follow any other religion. But I've seen no evidence of anything other than a single religion predominating Bajor. They follow the Prophets. A tiny percentage are members of the Pah-wraith cult, and are ostracized. In any event, the Federation tends to let its individual members choose their own systems of government— and we've had some doozies.
  • True, but Sisko also said at one point that the Federation prohibits "caste-based discrimination" and will refuse membership to worlds that practice it. We can assume they also prohibit religious discrimination since it makes no sense to ban the former but not the latter. Since discrimination against religious minorities is never brought up as a possible barrier to Bajor's admission to the Federation, we can assume the Bajorans don't discriminate against religious minorities. At least, not officially.
• It's possible that this is meant to say more about the Bajoran people than the Bajoran form of government. They've not even a generation removed from The Occupation, in which the Cardassians dominated every aspect of the Bajoran way of life except for their religion. For better or worse, people often turn to religion when placed in an intolerable situation. The Bajorans were slaves and prisoners under Cardassian rule, and like slaves and prisoners often do, they tried to find comfort in their religion. It makes sense that once they were free, they looked to their clergy for leadership. Electing Shakaar instead of Winn is might be meant to be seen another step toward a healed Bajor.
  • Actually, I believe there was an exchange between Kira and Winn that was something akin to Kira telling the Kai that admitting the Kai was wrong took courage, and Winn responding with something like "you resistance people are all the same, what about us that preached the word of the Prophets under threat of death" or something akin to that.
  • To be precise: "Those of you who were in the Resistance, you're all the same. You think you're the only ones who fought the Cardassians, that you saved Bajor singlehandedly. Perhaps you forget, Major, the Cardassians arrested any Bajoran they found teaching the word of the Prophets. I was in a Cardassian prison camp for five years and I can remember each and every beating I suffered. And while you had your weapons to protect you, all I had was my faith and my courage." It doesn't quite line up with continuity since it was obvious that the formal structures of the Bajoran religion did persist throughout the Occupation.
• It makes sense that everyone on Bajor believes in the Prophets because they are very real. The only points of contention are whether the Bajoran religion is truly influenced by them intentionally (rather than simply being 'interpretation' of the orbs sending out random images) and, if so, whether any given person should listen to them or not. Just because God exists, and tells you what to do, does not make it the right thing to do.
  • Yep, not only are the Prophets real, but the Federation also recognizes they are real. They just call them "wormhole aliens" instead of Prophets.

• Even in the United States, it would hardly be without precedent for a religious official to hold a major political office. After all, Mike Huckabee was Governor of Arkansas and ran for president while being an ordained minister, and Jimmy Carter was a Baptist deacon ("Deacon" was even his Secret Service codename!). Certainly some religions (including Catholicism) bar their officials from holding political office but not all by a long shot, and the fact that a person is a political leader and a religious one at the same time does not in itself make for a theocracy.
• The other question this issue raises is a more practical one. Isn't being both Kai and First Minister far more responsibilities than one person could ever take on? Even if no law prevented, just for a random example, the Dalai Lama from running for President of India, isn't it still practically ruled out by the sheer volume of work that would entail? In the scenario prevented in "Shakaar," it seems less like Queen Elizabeth being simultaneously a de jure head of state and the titular head of the Church of England (which she is) and more like the Archbishop of Canterbury also being Prime Minster of the United Kingdom! Imagine the paperwork!
  • With enough skill and delegation there is no problem. Now whether Winn had those skills or the willingness to delegate is another question entirely.
    • True enough, and in any pure theocracy, the office of head of government and that of religious leader are one and the same. But the point I was trying to strike is just that in a system that is not geared this way, in which these are separate offices, merging them seems like an Herculean task.
    • With the ramshackle nature of the "Provisional" Government of Bajor and the power-seeking/controlling nature of her character, I'm willing to be Winn probably had some interesting ideas on merging the office of First Minister and Kai as far as duties went. Probably not realistic ideas (it would certainly nix any idea about Federation membership, not that Winn would lose any sleep over that), but that is Winn in a nutshell.
  • For the record, the Dalai Lama was the head of government for Tibet for centuries, until it was conquered by China and the current Dalai Lama went into exile.
    • That's perhaps the purest definition of a theocracy — the head of government and head of a faith being one and the same.
• Well actually the Pope is both the religious leader of the Catholic Church AND the head of state of the Vatican City, and the Dalai Lama although in exile, was until very recently similarly handling both political (or at least administrative) and religious offices, so yes, it can be done. But anyway, in most countries is not forbidden for a religious figure to run for office, and I can be wrong because I’m not American, but as far as I know it’s not forbidden either in the USA, to give an example the president of the Mormon faith can run for president of the USA if he wants, as the president of any other denomination like the Lutherans or the Episcopalians, they just choose not to do it, probably to avoid mixing religion and politics. Some countries do have that specific prohibition, for example in Mexico and Costa Rica their constitutions explicitly forbid that Catholic priests can run for public office, but these is mainly because their current constitutions were written after liberal revolutions again the conservatives and the idea of Church/State separation becoming very important for the liberals because their defeated enemies had the endorsement of the Church. Clearly if Bajor haven’t pass through that kind of social and historical context they probably see no reason for the prevention.
  • Minor thing, but since 1983 Catholicism does explicitly prohibit its clergy from running for civil office (other than in the Vatican, obviously). It's not unheard of, though. Some countries have constitutions that prohibit it as well, largely in Latin America.
  • Contrary to popular belief, the US tradition of separation of church and state is just that, a tradition. The Constitution never uses the phrase in any way. All it says in the Bill of Rights is that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Essentially, it says that Congress can't establish a state religion (e.g. The Church England) or prevent people from worshiping as they wish. There is nothing at all about a person keeping their personal religious beliefs separate from civic duties.
• It can be noted that the writers often treated Bajor as if it were a theocracy, with the Kai being entrusted with negotiating treaties with the Cardassians ("Life Support") and Dominion ("In the Cards") rather than a representative of the planet's civilian government. One wonders if prior to the Occupation, the Kai was literally the head of state. The show's subtle shift away from Bajoran politics in later seasons leaves some promising avenues of storytelling unexplored (a brewing civil war representing a power struggle between Shakaar and Winn, perhaps — maybe over entry to the Federation? Where would the moderate Vedeks fall in? Does the average Bajoran side with the Provisional Government or the traditional religious authority of the Kai? Do more religious elements of the military break with Shakaar and side with Winn? etc.).
  • So Bajor is basically Iran...
  • For the record, the non-canon prequel novel trilogy Terok Nor shows Bajor did have a (theoretically) secular government before the Occupation.
  • Interestingly, in "Sanctuary," we have both a Vedek and Minister travelling to DS9 to give the Skrreans the bad news, no doubt to make it clear that both the religious and civil authorities are in accord on this matter.
• Should be notice that both the Pope and the Dalai Lama have mostly ceremonial functions. The day-to-day administrative work is at the hands of others, each monastery has its own abbot, each order (in the case of Catholicism) and each school (in the case of Tibetan Buddhism) have their own hierarchy, and so on. As very old and very spread faiths that pre-date modern technology most of the management is already widely delegated into local authorities. I'm pretty sure the Dalai Lama can be Prime Minister of India and the Pope president of the US (or more likely Argentina I guess) without their respective religions to even feel it. If Bajor's religious organization is similar and most likely it is, then there's your answer.
  • Another possibility is that, in general, the First Minister is more a rubber-stamp position (think the theoretical role of the US President, whose main job is signing/vetoing bills passed by the Legislative Branch). Might be that being Kai and First Minister is mostly about greenlighting the decisions of others (Vedeks/Ministers, respectively) more than ACTIVELY running things (unless you're Winn).

We're more justified than you!

• The Bajorans. While you can sympathize with their plight that they've had 50 years of Holocaust-style oppression under the Cardassians, it starts to lose its impact when they excuse themselves at every opportunity of doing some evil act as being what they would have done during the Occupation. Sometimes they actually seem more cruel and extremist than the Cardassians.
  • It becomes more egregious when you realize they had invented advanced technology BEFORE humanity even moved out of caves, what apart from religious fanaticism exactly stagnated the Bajorans so?
  • It's hardly uncommon in Real Life. A person or a group of people feel (and might be entirely correct in doing so) that they have been victimized and so any action they take is justified while any action against them is not^note Please no inserting RL examples, let's just say that they may exist depending on your viewpoint and leave it at that. In the eyes of many Bajorans what happened was either entirely justified or forced to happen by the Cardassians.
    • In the Star Trek Terok Nor prequel novels, the reason for Bajor's "stagnation" is made clear: They have everything they need. Prior to the Cardassians' arrival, they had little interest in meeting with other races or even colonizing outside their star system, and those that did were considerd fringe, at best.
    • A good comparison for this can be made with the Vulcans. They were way more advanced than humans, even leaving out Enterprise continuity. In the span of a few centuries Starfleet has outstripped them completely. The Bajorans just didn't have that drive.
    • That's not really the best example, because Vulcan is a founding member of the Federation. Vulcan scientists work side by side with human ones designing Starfleet's technology. And even when they don't work directly with each other, they share their discoveries.
    • We learn in the episode Accession that Bajor used to have a harsh caste system which only ended when the Cardassians came along. This was demonstrated beautifully by Kira (a lifelong warrior) being forced to become an artist and failing miserably. Its no wonder they ended up stagnating as they did. Imagine a whole planet like that, where your Einstein is emptying your bins and your Picasso is cooking your dinner. There was also a nasty back of the bus mentality that went along with it which we saw demonstrated when one woman reverently gave up her seat for Kira. Its a wonder that they ever managed to get as advanced as they did.
  • That seems to be the point that they were trying to make by having them act this way: it's understandable to blame the Occupation for Bajor's initial miseries, and even for a lot of what happens later i.e. being unable to defend themselves when the Dominion come calling. However, it is wrong to use that to justify actions that are as immoral as what they were fighting against, i.e. the bombing of Keiko's school. It's a sign of how far Bajor has to come before it can stand on its own feet again without someone to keep them on the straight and narrow. For lack of a better analogy, Sisko (and by extension, the Federation) is like a therapist trying to help an abuse victim avoid repeating the cycle of trauma that was inflicted on them and find productive ways to move on from what happened.
    • That was the main thrust of Kira, and Bajor's, development in the series, the Bajorans have every right to be angry about the occupation but they're not doing themselves any favors in the long run. DS9 questioned a lot of Star Trek morality, but in Bajor's case, embracing the Federation's brand of multiculturalism really was the practical option.

The terrorist is right

• Kira's reaction when confronted with her crimes in "The Darkness And The Light". She killed innocent people. She admits it, and she doesn't feel the least bit guilty. Her response is to get angry at the guy who tells her how many innocents she hurt and yell at him that he was a legitimate target because he was a Cardassian on Bajor and it didn't matter whether he was a member of the military or not. And that all of the other people she killed, whether adults or elderly or children, whether military or civilian, whether armed or unarmed...they all deserved it because they were Cardassians on Bajor. After seeing that episode, I was glad that one of her victims put her through hell by murdering the other members of her resistance cell. She deserved it, and so did they.
  • Your mileage may vary, but I love this episode for being one of the few episodes to show that several issues are multi-sided. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
  • Kind of ignoring the circumstances of the statement. Kira was not only in the last stages of pregnancy, so the extra hormones weren't helping, the man was planning to cut the baby out of her, a baby that wasn't even hers but actually her close friend's, after she spent days watching her friends be murdered one after another. Had he merely shown up at the station and asked for an apology she may very well have given it to him, she had an entire episode in the first season where she learned the valuable lesson that not all Cardassians were monsters and should be punished solely for existing. Neither of them were particularly rational about the subject by that point.
  • I personally thought it was great that she wasn't apologetic. She didn't try the "you're right, we all did things we had to do, it was war, can't we all get along?" card. She went right out and said, "Whether you were a military general or you picked up garbage for a living, you were a legitimate target!" Try to put yourself in her shoes... your country has been successfully invaded by a brutal dictatorship that enslaves, rapes and murders your people. I'd say the same damn thing.
    • That's pretty much the exact story of the Maquis (the French guerrilla fighters, not the group from the show), and history remembers them very kindly.
    • The main problem with the episode was it completely contradicted the much better season 1 episode "Duet", where Kira managed to mature past that black and white worldview and accept that the people at the bottom weren't automatically guilty. Darkness and Light was a real step backwards in both Kira's character development, and the maturity of the show as a whole.
    • One way of reconciling "Duet" and this episode is that in "Duet", Kira was forced to accept that Cardassians weren't all monsters, and some were truly good people. Note that Kira never disagrees with Marritza's claim that all Cardassia is guilty of the crimes during the Occupation. But in "The Darkness and the Light", Kira was dealing with an insane murderer. Her musings at the end made me think that she pitied Prin on some level, but that she felt she wasn't wrong.
    • It's not hard to reconcile them at all. Her point in "The Darkness and the Light" was that while fighting in the resistance, all Cardassians were legitimate targets as a means to the ends of getting them off the planet. Her point in "Duet" was that, in hindsight and from the Cardassians' point of view, their actions were not equally villainous. You may not like that mixture, but it's perfectly consistent; wartime and peacetime ethics are different. And also, in "Duet" he was repentant.
    • Also, consider the situation. By the time Prin says this, he's killed several of her friends and is holding her hostage. She's probably not inclined to be sympathetic.
  • Provoking these kinds of questions was the episode's point. I'm not convinced it does it especially well, but credit where credit is due.
    • It's debatable if those people were truly innocent. They were taking advantage of oppression, enslavement, and murder to live their lives as they wished.
    • Were they? The Cardassian Union seems to be highly autocratic. They might well have been conscripted into their positions. When you live in a dystopian dictatorship where dissent is punished with death, sometimes "just following orders" is a legitimate defense.
    • It's hard to say how legal theory might work several centuries from now but the defense of simply following orders hasn't protected anyone from being arrested for simply being guards at Nazi concentration camps.
    • Nazi concentration camp guards weren't forced into those jobs against their will. They would've either volunteered or been specially chosen for their obscene loyalty to the Nazi party and/or hatred of Jews. And we're not talking about a guard at a Cardassian death camp here. We're talking about a household servant. He probably had no choice at all in where he worked or who he worked for.
    • In addition, although the Nuremberg tribunal rejected following orders as a defense, they did accept the defense of being threatened with death for noncompliance, exonerating Nazi defendants who could substantiate this defense.
    • Further in addition, the Nuremberg tribunal did not put every concentration camp officer on trial. They weren't interested in putting filing clerks, cooks, or janitors in prison just because they happened to get reassigned to Auschwitz. A lot of people on this thread have cited Marritza and claimed that his clear guilt and repentance is what makes him different from Prin. And while Marritza's attitude surely had a profound effect on Kira, at the end of the day she still would have been bound by law to release him even if he hadn't been repentant. Because no matter how you slice it he wasn't a war criminal. In order to be a war criminal you have to actually commit a war crime, and Marritza never did. And neither did Prin. Prin might have indirectly benefited from the occupation in some way, but that alone doesn't make him a legitimate target. At best, you could argue that he was collateral damage, but even that is arguable and depends on whether you think the "collateral damage" argument is morally justifiable.
• Marritza was trying to get Cardassia to acknowledge its war guilt and was willing to die in process. The other guy was murdering her friends, it's not surprising that he got a different response. If he'd confronted her without killing her friends she might have been more sympathetic.
  • Adding to that, with Marritza, she had learned that not all Cardassians are guilty and deserved to shot. It required compassion, mercy and forgiveness. Marritza, driven by guilt, was trying to get the Cardassians to accept personal responsibility for what they did the the Bajorans. With this, it's the reverse. The Cardassian was the one who was injured by Kira and wanted her to accept personal responsibility for what she did to him while she was a resistance fighter. Unfortunately, he was to driven by madness to consider mercy and his vengeance on her old comrades hardly motivated her into accepting personal responsibility.
• The Bajoran Resistance was fighting a desperate war against a vastly superior enemy. An enemy that was enslaving, raping, and murdering Bajoran civilians as a matter of course. A horrific state of affairs that persisted for 50 years. The fact that they didn't intentionally target Cardassian civilians is a testament to their moral fortitude. It took a lot less than that to get the Allies to bomb civilian targets in WWII.
• To expand on the person above me, Kira has absolutely nothing to apologize for. She was born 30 years into, and lived the first 25 years of her life under, a brutal military occupation where the Cardassians were stealing Bajoran women as whores for the brass, herding them into concentration camps, and enslaving and slaughtering them by the millions. They pillaged Bajor's natural and cultural resources, banned the free practice of their religion, poisoned the earth, and in general committed war crime after war crime. The unfortunate truth is that at that point, anyone, Bajoran or Cardassian, civilian or not, who willingly aids the Cardassian Guard occupying forces makes themselves into a legitimate military target. And since the Bajoran Resistance has no way of knowing who's there willingly and who isn't, they don't have a choice but to accept the collateral damage.
  
  As I did when this was brought up on the Star Trek Online forums, I will also point out the use of past tense when Kira told that asshole he was a legitimate target. See Aamin Marritza from "Duet", and put two and two together. She doesn't consider Cardassian civilians legitimate targets anymore.
  • Another thing to consider is motivation. With Prin, Kira is TRYING to provoke him, to break through that cold psychopathy and get him to leave himself vulnerable. It's the equivalent of taunting someone with "Oh, now I remember! Your family died, whimpering like the DOGS that they were, crying for mercy", with the express intent of getting a rise out of them.

New Bajoran Prisoners As the Plot Demands

• In season 2's premiere "The Homecoming", while discussing with Dax whether he should give Kira the runabout to go rescue Li Nalas, Sisko asks, "Suppose I give her the runabout and she does rescue Li Nalas. What do I say to the Cardassians?" Dax replies, "The question is, what do they say to us? They swore they released all their Bajoran prisoners." Now, of course, Kira rescues Li, and it turns out they have a dozen more Bajoran prisoners in that prison camp on Cardassia IV, which Dukat has released, probably to save face. (Because I do not believe him when he says the Central Command was unaware of the presence of those prisoners. They're not that stupid.) So presumably all the Bajoran prisoners detained by the Cardassian government were released then and there. Yet, later that season the Cardassian government agrees to release six Bajoran prisoners in exchange for Natima Lang, Hogue and Rekelen. What Bajoran prisoners?! And then in season 3's "Life Support", we learn explicitly that Cardassia is withholding certain detainees which they hadn't previously mentioned.
  • Actually, this is totally in character with Cardassian society, military, and morality. The Central Command only admits to crimes when it's been caught. It's no surprise to me that years after the Occupation ended, the Cardassians could still be holding Bajorans prisoner. They're Cardassians, the Space Nazis of Star Trek.
  • Not to mention, this is playing off of real-world incidents. For example, the Soviet Union held on to German POWs for years after the war ended. There's also persistent (though entirely apocryphal) stories about American POWs still being secretly held by Vietnam or China after the Vietnam War.
  • Original Poster: But that's exactly my point. Since the Cardassians have already promised that they released all their Bajoran prisoners, the Federation and Bajor should take a more hard-line stance when Cardassia attempts to negotiate with the release of (allegedly nonexistent) Bajoran prisoners. Their governments should say, "What Bajoran prisoners? Your government already agreed to release all of them, and we demand that you live up to that agreement."
    • I agree; this is a simple continuity problem.
  • It could have been a one-time amnesty at the end of the occupation; the Bajorans captured later would be members of the Maquis or other terrorists that carried on the fight after the occupation was over. Though they may be criminals, Bajor would want their citizens back because their government knows full well how harshly Cardassians treat their prisoners.
  • It could have been that the Cardassians were releasing all political prisoners in that agreement, and later prisoner releases were for crimes such as murder, theft, etc. that took place under the Occupation. Or prisoners taken since the end of the Occupation for things like border incursion, smuggling, or espionage.
  • At least for the first year or two of the series, it seems that Cardassia had been looking at the Occupation from a perspective of 'we'll be back shortly.' They didn't expect the provisional government to last, and eventually, the Bajorans would send Starfleet away, leaving Bajor ripe for their return. Especially once the wormhole was revealed, they wanted to go back. So they would keep a handful of prisoners as bargaining chips - "Let us return these Bajoran prisoners who got 'lost in the system," and using that to return to take charge of the 'situation' again. Legal, no, but the Cardassian military tends to follow the belief of they're the ones making the laws, they can decide what's legal. Also, part of the reason that Kira has to mount a rescue of Li Nalas and the other prisoners is the fact that they shouldn't be there - if the Cardassians were confronted with the fact that Bajorans know about these remaining prisoners, they'd probably just kill them then and there, just to keep from being caught in a lie. "No prisoners here, the people you're talking about were executed."
  • Perhaps they were simply misfiled? Perhaps if they'd had Maritza on the job, they wouldn't have miscounted their prisoners.

Jerk refuses to help? No higher authorities.

• In the episode Babel the station has been completely shut down by an old Bajoran-engineered virus that not only causes aphasia but also seems to be lethal if untreated. Kira manages to find a doctor on Bajor who might have some knowledge of it but the moment she brings it up he cuts off communications. Her response is to kidnap him and force him to help them find a cure. It never once occurs to anyone to contact the Bajoran government, explain the situation (including the many infected Bajorans) and ask them to send him to help? For that matter, couldn't the Bajoran government threaten the doctor with prosecution over his negligence? Is force and deliberately infecting him really the first thing that goes through Kira's mind?
  • Kidnapping is generally faster than dealing with red tape, even the emergency services.
  • This is an early first season episode - Bajor is still recovering from the aftereffects of the recent Cardassian occupation and withdrawal and it's likely that the provisional government isn't sufficiently established to be able to help here. It's also consistent with Kira's personality that she would take the direct approach over appealing to whatever authority might exist.

"Faith" in The Prophets

• In Covenant, Odo laments the fact that he wants to share going to religious services with Kira, but that he's not a believer. But...The Prophets—or "Wormhole Aliens"—definitely do exist. They live outside of time, and can see both the past and future. They clearly have a special relationship with the Bajorans. These are indisputable facts. What "faith" do you need to believe in, or pray to, something for which there's unambiguous evidence?
  • While they exist and have a special relationship with the Bajorans, he probably lacks belief in religious ceremony. To him, praying is pointless, because he'd be better off getting in the shuttle and going into the wormhole. As a result, he would find the experience itself meaningless.
  • If God was discovered to be real do you think all Atheists in the world would suddenly convert? No of course not, because even then he would probably be classified by science as a new species of life rather than a deity to be worshiped. Its the same here, just because the Prophets exist doesn't make them Gods in the eyes of non-Bajorans no matter what their powers may be.
    • When one of Kira's ex resistance buddies is assassinated, she says "He died serving the Prophets, they'll take care of him." Sisko is deferential, but there's no concrete proof in the series that the Prophets have an afterlife.
    • The series tiptoes around what the Bajoran view of the afterlife is meant to be. Winn refers to Bareil's death as "having left us to walk with the Prophets" — is this meant to be literal (Bajorans' spirits are meant to go to the Celestial Temple) or just a euphemism? If it's the former, are all the devout supposed to go, or is Bareil a special case because he was a vedek? Perhaps they're vaguely like Judaism, as a religion in which the afterlife is deemphasized.
    • This argument is supported by the fact that Starfleet regularly calls the Prophets 'Wormhole Aliens'. It's only those who've been stationed at DS9 for a while that really use the Bajoran name, so it's certain that Starfleet holds the view that they're just aliens, not gods (especially considering all the A God Am I aliens Starfleet has encountered over the years). So it's entirely plausible that Odo shares that view. Plus, remember his own species goes around claiming they're gods which is something Odo is opposed to, so it's unsurprising that he'd also reject claims to godhood by other species. And theres also the possibility that before sending the infant changelings out into the Galaxy, the Founders may have subliminally programmed them to reject other species' claims to god hood and that they were the only ones to have the right to that claim (or at least accept they are gods but that the Founders are the 'one true gods' a la the Abrahamic god declaring 'You shall have no other God before me.'), which would mean he's psychologically incapable of having faith in another religion.
    • I think maybe the word "faith" should have been replaced with "devotion". Having faith in a god technically just means believing they exist and can do all the things their followers say they can do. In common parlance, having faith in a religion and being a member of the religion are often treated as synonyms, since people who believe there are ultra-powerful entities out there judging their behavior generally want to get on those entities' good side. However, this is not always the case (see: maltheists or misotheists, who believe God exists, but think he's an asshole), and in such situations you need to be a little more careful with your wording.
    • "Faith" doesn't really mean "belief"; it means "trust". If someone has faith in me, that doesn't mean they simply believe I exist, but that they trust me. Similarly, the Bajorans trust the Prophets to take care of them.
    • "Faith" means either or both (it can also mean "duty"), which is why discussions about it tend to devolve into mutual accusations of Four Terms Fallacy.
  • Remember this is a universe where the Greek Gods actually existed and Kirk met Apollo. Add in the Q, Organinans, and Metrons and it's easy to believe godlike beings exist, but you don't have believe they answer your prayers because most of them don't. Bajorans believe the Prophets answer their prayers and given their temporal nature, it's hard to answer if/when they decided to be "of Bajor". They certainly don't have a clue in the pilot, despite having been central to Bajoran culture for centuries.
  • Worth noting that while everyone knows the Prophets are real, Bajorans ascribe a lot of things to them that they may not necessarily actually be doing. This is where Bajorans and non-believers in the Bajoran religion part ways. It's entirely possible that the aliens in the wormhole care not a bit for all the prayers and ceremony cast in their direction.

Bajorans in the Mirror Universe

• Mirror Leeta ("The Emperor's New Cloak"). In the mirror universe the Terrans are to the Bajorans what the Cardassians are in the prime universe and the Cardassians saved their asses, so what the hell is Leeta doing working for the Terrans?
  • The Terran Empire seems to have been overthrown by the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance at least a few decades before the DS9 crossover, possibly more than seventy years prior, and if Intendant Kira is any indication Alliance Bajor seems to be a fairly oppressive place (it's just that the oppressors are Bajoran too). It's possible that by this time memories of Terran atrocities are fading, and that some Bajoran losers of internecine struggles might decide to join up with the Terrans against common foes (some might decide that freedom thing the Terrans are talking about sounds good too, although this is the Mirror Universe).
    • Not to mention that the Mirror Universe is rather known for self-serving backstabbing. Perhaps Mirror Leeta just thinks she has more to gain from being on what looks like the winning side.

He Served Only Justice

• How did Odo gain a reputation as a paragon of justice and fairness among the Bajorans for his work during the Occupation? While we don't know for sure that he fought the Resistance or hunted escaped slaves, we do know that every single Bajoran he arrested was summarily executed, no matter how small the crime. In the mind of most people, let alone the Bajorans who aren't known to be forgiving, that should more than undo any sense of justice or fairness brought about by him always arresting the right person, so why is Odo treated so much better than the Bajorans who served as Quislings?
  • Probably because prior to Odo, when a crime was committed, the Cardassians often just rounded up some random Bajoran civilians, shot them, and called the case closed. Odo's insistence on conducting legitimate investigations gave Bajoran suspects an actual chance of not being summarily executed for crimes they didn't commit. That's actually pretty huge for brutally oppressed natives of an occupied land.
    • Good point. Though Dukat not being as bad as his predecessors didn't win him any popularity contests, and some of the aforementioned Bajoran Quislings were also probably quite lenient to their own people if you only compare them to Cardassian officials. Perhaps Odo being neither Bajoran, so it's harder to consider him a traitor, or Cardassian, allowed him to be judged by a unique standard.
  • We should also be careful not to overblow Odo's image in the minds of the Bajorans. I may be wrong, but I don't think there's anything in the show that explicitly makes him out to be a hero or anything like that. The Bajorans didn't adore him or anything, but they saw that he was as fair a constable as anyone could expect under Cardassian rule. Most of the praise we hear for Odo comes from Kira, who is a close friend of his and knows his character better than anyone else. She was his first suspect in his first case and saw first hand his impartiality and how he refused to be intimidated by Dukat. Kira may well have been the biggest reason Odo was so accepted by the Bajorans. They already saw him as an impartial mediator; having a reputable member of the resistance attesting to his character even as an official security officer would carry a lot of weight with the general public.