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Eugene Wesley Roddenberry (1921 - 1991) was a military pilot, police officer, television writer, and television producer; he is best known for having created the Star Trek television series.
Raised as a Baptist, Roddenberry attended church every week with his mother throughout most of his childhood. He began to reject the teachings of his church between 14 and 16 years old. As an adult he recalled the religion he was raised in with some disdain. As an adult he identified himself as a Humanist. In 1986 he joined the American Humanist Association and remained a Humanist throughout the rest of his life.[1]
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"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." -- Gene Roddenberry, Free Inquiry (autumn, 1992)
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"I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will--and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain." -- Gene Roddenberry
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"I listened to the sermon, and I remember complete astonishment because what they were talking about were things that were just crazy. It was communion time, where you eat this wafer and are supposed to be eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. My first impression was, "This is a bunch of cannibals they've put me down among!" For some time, I puzzled over this and puzzled over why they were saying these things, because the connection between what they were saying and reality was very tenuous. How the hell did Jesus become something to be eaten?
I guess from that time it was clear to me that religion was largely nonsense--largely magical, superstitious things. In my own teen life, I just couldn't see any point in adopting something based on magic, which was obviously phony and superstitious." -- Gene Roddenberry, The Humanist, Mar/Apr 1991
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"It was at Denver that someone wrote a question "What is your religion?" My answer was: "I do not belong to any church but I do consider myself a religious man. I believe that I am a part of you and you are a part of me and we are a part of all life . . . also a part of the creative force and intelligence behind life. Therefore, if we are a part of God then our lives are not brief meaningless things, but rather have a great importance and significance. All of us and each of us." -- Gene Roddenberry
"I think God is as much a basic ingredient in the universe as neutrons and positrons . . . God is, for lack of a better term, clout. This is the prime force, when we look around the universe." -- Gene Roddenberry [2]
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It seems to me -- it's likely that heaven's here right now. If you could take life with its pain and misery, where you fail and you sometimes win, and if you package it into a game, people would pay a fortune to have this game. And I don't know that I'd want it to be resolved so peacefully that the game would be all over. -- Gene Roddenberry quoted by Jim Dew