Any Star Trek fan can tell you that Leonard Nimoy is the son of Jewish immigrants, and the “live long and prosper” line and hand gesture were taken from the Priestly Blessing.  Most fans could also tell you that William Shatner too is a child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.  Some will also tell you that the character Lt. Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation is also Jewish, because his parents were played by the renowned Jewish actors Theodore Bikel and Georgia Brown.

Their creator, Gene Roddenberry, was anything but Jewish.  He was born a Southern Baptist in Texas, and his adult life was dedicated to the Secular Humanist movement.  But I just read a wonderful line from a 1994 interview with Roddenberry.  He said:  

“I’ve elected to believe in a God which is so far beyond our conception and real understanding that it would be nonsense to do anything in its name other than perhaps to revere all life as being part of that unfathomable greatness.”

Sounds good to me!  It’s reminiscent of some Einstein comments that I’ve read.  I found three wonderful ones on a fascinating website called spaceandmotion.com:

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.