Can non-Klingons go to Sto-Vo-Kor?
- Thread starter Yevetha
- Start date
I don't see why not. We saw Worf go out of his way to ensure that Jadzia would end up in Sto-Vo-Kor.
Klingons would do wisely to consider "being Klingon" to be a state of mind. After all, a large part of their fighting force in the TOS era consisted of people who did not conform to the Klingon biological norm... Telling them that they don't get any heavenly reward for their devotion to the Empire is not the best possible personnel management move!
Curzon Dax got made honorary Klingon easily enough. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if Kirk got a Sto-Vo-Kor ticket as well. Given how vague the afterlife tends to be, Kirk probably exists in at least a dozen different paradises simultaneously, in addition to the hundreds of hells he also inhabits (and possibly rules by now).
Timo Saloniemi
Curzon Dax got made honorary Klingon easily enough. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if Kirk got a Sto-Vo-Kor ticket as well. Given how vague the afterlife tends to be, Kirk probably exists in at least a dozen different paradises simultaneously, in addition to the hundreds of hells he also inhabits (and possibly rules by now).
Timo Saloniemi
Why would they WANT to?
If you really think about heaven, it's really the place you think is the ideal place for you...where you wanted to be. The most perfect place...! Not like this chaotic, crappy, imperfect place we call the universe!
If it's the perfect place for oneself amd one's predelictions, the I'll be alone with books and the internet. Og, wait, I've seen that Twilight Zone before . . . Then I step on my glasses like Burgess Meredith, and can't read.
I'll stick to Sto-vo-Bridge.
This question presupposes that Sto-Vo-Kor actually exists in the ST reality.
Which given the original Roddenberian "religion = bullshit" bent of ST is a big if.
(Stuff like that awful Torres episode with her mother is easy to explain: she hallucinated. Loads of people have NDE's and they feel very real but that doesn't make them so.)
Likewise the wormhole aliens / Prophets of Bajor aren't true "gods" just another example of life Jim but not as we know it.
Which given the original Roddenberian "religion = bullshit" bent of ST is a big if.
(Stuff like that awful Torres episode with her mother is easy to explain: she hallucinated. Loads of people have NDE's and they feel very real but that doesn't make them so.)
Likewise the wormhole aliens / Prophets of Bajor aren't true "gods" just another example of life Jim but not as we know it.
In the post-GR era, afterlifes are real. Harry Kim shipped in a coffin to an asteroid of the dead that Janeway implies is radioactive or something magical at the end. Siskos in some next dimension/life. And I really got the impression we were to think sto-vo-kor is real in some objective sense aside from Torres' mind. Maybe we weren't.
In the post-GR era, afterlifes are real. Harry Kim shipped in a coffin to an asteroid of the dead that Janeway implies is radioactive or something magical at the end. Sisko's in some next dimension/life. And I really got the impression we were to think sto-vo-kor is real in some objective sense aside from Torres' mind. Maybe we weren't.
We actually saw B'Elanna go to Gre'thor (Klingon hell), so I'm guessing the showmakers believe they are real. 
We actually saw B'Elanna go to Gre'thor (Klingon hell), so I'm guessing the showmakers believe they are real.
All of these can be explained away as hallucinations.
The Sto-Vo-Kor one with B'elanna is particularly dumb for a number of reasons.
For a start B'elanna isn't a Klingon. She is a bispecial person being 50% human (y'know, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, from earth) and 50% Klingon. If she was going to have an afterlife then why would it be Sto-Vo-Kor and Grethor, rather than (say) plain old Heaven and Hell?
Her ancestors on Qo'nos obviously have believed in Sto-Vo-Kor and Grethor for centuries... her ancestors on her dad's side have probably been atheistic of late, but go back a few centuries and they were likely Catholic, and eventually before that, they were Aztec / Mayan (going off the assumption the Torres family were Mexican which IIRC was hinted at in some of the EU materials) with all the sun worship and heart chopping that entialed. Her unique situation makes the whole Klingon afterlife storyline particularly bad if you're going to treat if as proof of the whole thing being an actual true religion. Why did one family side's afterlife take precedence over the other?
Better to say that whole experience was a hallucination brought on under a certain very stressful near death situation and subconciously based on ideas of a particular religious afterlife (Sto-Vo-Kor / Grethor) inculculated into her during her life on Qo'nos with her mother. Klingon religion remains as much BS as human religion.
Another thing that's somewhat dumb is the apparant monoreligious nature of Klingons, and indeed many species in ST. Humans had buddhism, hinduism, animism, the big Abrahamic faiths, zorastrianism, nature worshiping faiths, sun and moon worship, ancien Egyptian stuff, the Greco-Roman patheons, the Norse pantheon...
...but hey guess what?
Bajorans have the Prophets / Pah wraiths. ALL of them. It's the ONLY religion any bajoran has.
Klingons have Sto-Vo-Kor and all that. The ONLY religion that ANY Klingons believe in. And once again the ALL believe in it. Qo'Nos, like Foxholes, is apparently devoid of atheists.
I could go on, but it would get tedious and it's already the start of a sidetrack.
Anyway, back to where I was at... none of what we saw literally makes religions real. Mr. Laser Beam said we saw B'elanna go to Gre'Thor... on the contrary I put that what we actually saw was simply what she percieved, ergo it's no more nescesarily real than any of the other dodgy hallucinations and visions that multiple people have experienced when encountering the anomaly-of-the-week all through ST.
The same thing goes for Kim and his experience. None of it validates religions or traditional afterlifes.
As for Sisko I already covered him above. The wormhole aliens copied Sisko's brainstate into their own mental form of existence, thereby stopping him from dying. It doesn't make them god, nor does it violate the GR religion stance. They're just very advanced. Probably not as advanced as the Q Continuum, but pretty well up there. Basically Sisko got less of an Elijah Flaming Chariot experience, and more of a Dave Bowman uplift.
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Every culture seems to have their own idea of the afterlife and certainly, it is even different from person to person in the same culture because this kindda stuff is really left up the imagination. That's why heaven is your ideal perfect place where you go after death.
Well, Dr. Mora Pol swears in the name of "his God"...
Also, there's plenty of diversity between the pieces of Bajoran culture we saw in the early seasons. Probably plenty enough that any two villages believing in the Prophets are believing in a completely different set of Prophets in a completely different way. (That they all believe in Prophets is rather understandable, considering that the Prophets are real. It's like having several types of Sun-worshipping religion, with the very real Sun as the constant.)
In this case, we haven't heard of alternate religions - unless one counts the reference to the Black Fleet instead of Sto-Vo-Kor in that song in "Soldiers of the Empire". But there's no telling how many atheists there are around. Certainly the TOS Klingons serve as examples of non-practicing worshippers, and possibly of atheists as well. (Although that's a misnomer, since all Kahlessian Klingons are atheists by definition - they believe there are no gods.)
Timo Saloniemi
Well, if we go by the "original Roddenberian" ideal, then religion is just fine. Kirk declares at least some humans as monotheists in Who Mourns for Adonis. McCoy states that he, Spock and Kirk represent many faiths in Bread and Circuses. There's a chapel on the Enterprise in Balance of Terror.
The whole "religion = bullshit" comes from the later Roddenberry of the TNG era. And given some of the batshit insane stuff he came up with there, I'll take his "idealized humanity" with a grain of salt.
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