ooksaidlibrarian:

“…and you are cute, too, in an annoying sort of way. Everybody’s cute….everybody’s cute. Even me. But in purple - I’m stunning!!”

Parliament of Dreams

You really need to watch this scene a couple of times and keep your eyes on each person at that table in turn. Delenn’s reactions are hilarious.

I’ve always liked the final demonstration of Earth’s dominant believe systems. That was a great moment, even for someone who is a non-believer like me (and the atheist comes first and no, it’s not an alphabetised queue). I wonder, though, if the other races really have all only one believe system.

The general impression I get is that they have a dominant belief but that there’s dissenting ideas within it.

The Japanese do a similar thing. The three largest religions in Japan are Shinto, Buddhist and Christian, but the Japanese have this holistic idea behind religion. They identify as one but will explore their spirituality in other avenues if it speaks to them.

Which really is the sense that I get from the major races in Babylon 5. For one, the Centauri have a pantheon. Of course obviously this is analogous to Rome, as a large amount of the Centauri culture is, so they all believe in the great maker, but also patronise other gods within the pantheon.

I know I’ve mentioned this before though but the real idea of the Earth demonstration is that Mankind is still too young to be out here making all these galaxy changing things happen. All the other races have these unified homoginised national identities where as Mankind doesn’t. EarthGov is basically the UN with more authority. Russia, America, England, China, South Africa et cetera, they still have their sovereignty. But mankind’s strength comes from their diversity and their ability to build lasting communities because of their similarities, whilst respecting their diversities, which is kind of an important aspect to one or two things that happen over the show’s run.