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Alien Contact And Religion


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http://www.space.com/16285-alien-life-discovery-religion-impact.html

 

I found this article interesting from Space.com. I agree with the article that the discovery of life beyond Earth would not disturb the major religions very much. However I also think if we were able to have friendly and extended contact with a group more advanced than us, and they were able to prove to us that no God exists religions would start having problems. Of course no matter what evidence we come to get, some religious extremist will never see things any other way than what they beleive. Does anyone else think alien contact would impact religion? Either intelligent life or any other form.

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I agree with the article that the discovery of life beyond Earth would not disturb the major religions very much.

...

Does anyone else think alien contact would impact religion?

Since so many scenarios are possible, I think this would depend critically on the specifics of the contact. However, my guess is that it would have a fairly profound impact on religion.

 

I expect it would result in the creation of many small, “splinter” religious movements incorporating the aliens into their accounts of the past, present, and future. Historically, as scientific ideas, have spread through the wider population, religions have incorporated them. Most of these religions have been minor, eventually having few or no adherents (eg: Swedenborgianism, founded 1787), but some have grown and remained large and influential, such as Mormonism, founded ca. 1820, now having about 14,000,000 adherents, and Seventh-day Adventistism, founded 1863, now having about 17,000,000. In these examples, the scientific idea of the likely existence of many Earth-like planets around stars other than the Sun, and the possibility of travel between them, are given religious significance.

 

History also shows a tendency of humans visited by people with technologies much more advanced than their own to deify and worship the visitors, especially if they are beneficial, so perhaps contact with space-faring aliens would trigger something like 19th and 20th century cargo cults.

 

However I also think if we were able to have friendly and extended contact with a group more advanced than us, and they were able to prove to us that no God exists religions would start having problems.

No matter how advanced they were, the logical problem of proving a negative would remain. For example, even a large body of evidence that, say, God and Angels don’t physically exist in the part of the heavens these aliens have explored can’t disprove the claim that God and Angels exist in a part of the heavens they have not.

 

Religions have always had problems with conflicts between objective, verifiable scientific evidence, and their dogma, yet have adapted and survived as institutions. As Mike Wall concludes in the opening paragraph of his space.com article, I, too, expect that they would continue to do so even if we were visited by people from outside our solar system.

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well i think aliens might have spirit, probably advanced knowledge or auras ( think of a species that evolved in space, how would they communicate without an atmoshere )

 

 

 

i bet it would effect religions, mabe they would be like, i told you not to do this, then you wrote to do it to non believers

 

or something like that

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Guest MacPhee

well i think aliens might have spirit, probably advanced knowledge or auras ( think of a species that evolved in space, how would they communicate without an atmoshere )

 

 

 

i bet it would effect religions, mabe they would be like, i told you not to do this, then you wrote to do it to non believers

 

or something like that

 

Yes, I think you're right. This theme has been well explored in Science Fiction, for example by Winston P Sanders' excellent tale "The Word To Space".

 

Earth radio-telescopes pick up interstellar broadcasts from planet Akron, which orbits Mu Cassiopeiae. Disappointingly, all the broadcasts contain nothing but the worst kind of extremist, proselytizing religious propaganda, with stuff like:

 

"The preacher Jilbmish called a great prayer meeting...he cried unto them 'Woe betide you, for you have transgressed against the righteous command of the Secondary and Tertiary Ones, namely you have begrudged the sacrifice and have failed to beat drums at the rising of Nomo', Sheemish xiv,6...Brethren beyond the stars, let us ponder this text together, for ignorance of the Way, even its least detail is not an excuse in sight of the Ones...the next word in the sentence from Aejae xliii, 3 is 'ruchiruchin', an archaic word concerning whose meaning there was formerly some dispute. Fortunately the advocates of the erroneous theory that it means 'very similar' have now been exterminated, and the glorious truth that it means 'quite similar' is firmly established...." And so on and so on.

 

Realising that Akron must be in the grip of a planet-wide theocracy, Earth scientists reply to the disturbing messages calmly, but ask lots of awkward questions about the Akronian religion. This leads eventually to revolution on Akron, and the collapse of the theocracy.

 

So it might be us who affect the aliens, rather than the other way round!

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I can't agree with you more belovelife. People refuse to see bad elements of their faith. Unless a super religion comes around and usurp's power from every other into one mega religion to unite the planet. I don't see that happening soon, so this planet will stay divided and in some cases at war over religion.

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Then it's settled, we will will send the good evangelical fundamentalist southern Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell as our ambassador along with a couple John Denver CD's and whole case of Cheese Whiz. That should help us win over their hearts and minds quick.

 

 

I think there are several professional creationists that should volunteer to go, they have worn out their welcome here on earth...

 

I think it can be asserted that alien contact could be the root of many religions... Ancient astronauts didn't build the pyramids but such aliens could very well have inspired the religions that built them.

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Guest MacPhee

I think there are several professional creationists that should volunteer to go, they have worn out their welcome here on earth...

 

I think it can be asserted that alien contact could be the root of many religions... Ancient astronauts didn't build the pyramids but such aliens could very well have inspired the religions that built them.

 

If all the blood-stained religions that we humans are afflicted with, were really caused by prehistoric contact with meddling aliens, I think the aliens have a lot to answer for. Perhaps that's why our SETI searches find only silence - the aliens are keeping quiet, guiltily aware of what they did to us...and fearing pay-back time.

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If all the blood-stained religions that we humans are afflicted with, were really caused by prehistoric contact with meddling aliens, I think the aliens have a lot to answer for. Perhaps that's why our SETI searches find only silence - the aliens are keeping quiet, guiltily aware of what they did to us...and fearing pay-back time.

 

I'm not sure what payback we could give aliens with such powerful technologies but i think they already live in our solar system, have been here for many thousands of years and the tinkering they did with our belief systems could have been accidental (cargo cults come to mind), or maybe they wanted to see if and how they could manipulate us in case they needed to at some future point in time.

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i bet they were well intentioned, saw a bunch of cute humas cleaning eachother hair from lice, and cuddling in a cave, so they decided to teach us law, cultivation, and rhythem

 

like a group, the started phylosiphies around the planet, all witrh the same base, but ewach one unique

 

which led to misinterpritation, chaos came in, and we all started fighting over religion,

then in the present time, some people are like, wish we didn't know

 

or like in the bible, the fruit of knowledge, kicked us out of the garden of eden, and christians are pi$$ed

 

i don't know,

 

the egyptians with hoarce, (i think)

 

ezekiel saw a wheel

 

swing low, sweet chatiot

 

thunderbirds

 

who knows,

 

mabe it was all a psycological experiment

 

on a solar sytem scale

 

where the solar sytem was made with 3 stars

 

one the goldilocks zone was earth

 

another europa or titan

 

then they introduce phylosophies on earth, to find out which one leads to the kindest, and the most warlike

 

on a scale

 

while mine options are probably false, it is what humans would probabbly do if we were the advance aliens

 

right?

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The idea of alien contact is extremely interesting and perhaps very telling, not necessarily about aliens but humans. I think UFOs are intimately connected with this, in historical times we went from seeing angels and demons to alien space craft but the descriptions are often very similar.

 

This stuff has been hashed out many times on this forum but while our historical ancestors might not have had photos of the things they saw they did indeed paint them, from cave walls to Renascence paintings people have been seeing things in the skies and drawing or painting them for a very long time.

 

In the late 1800's to early 1900's people saw sky ships with propellers and even anchors. Later they saw flying wings or discs, the battle of Los Angeles in 1941 was fought against glowing discs or airships depending on whether you are reading first hand accounts or accounts written later.

 

I know it's not good science but IF you assume these phenomena are real and not part of the human Psyche it begs the questions who, what, where, and why. I will attempt to, if not answer, at least define these questions..

 

Who? Aliens or the human mind? This is the central question to me, are these things real or products of the human mind? There is a third alternative, a natural occurrence but that still plays into the idea of a human minds interpretation of reality.

 

What? Lots of possibilities, from illusions created in the human mind to actual nuts and bolts space craft to multidimensional travelers, time travelers, and not to be ignored the possibility of natural phenomena.

 

Where? Again, do they originate in the human mind or outside the human mind? If outside then the real possibility of alien space craft of some sort would seem to be easier to explain than time travelers or multidimensional travelers but some sort of natural phenomena can still explain what we are seeing but it cannot account for all sightings either now or in the past. I suggest they originate inside our solar system, a long term colonization of the galaxy, star by star, by other intelligent beings, quite possibly many different intelligent beings.

 

Why? The $64,000 question and it is easy to answer. Any intelligent beings who have the built in urge to reproduce and expand their territory will eventually turn their gaze up... In a few million years, even without some magical technology, we will use the resources in our solar system to build artificial habitats and once we do we will eventually push the limits of our resources in our own region of space and again look outward. either that or go extinct as a species and leave no related species.

 

But of course this again begs the question, are we alone and if not... where are they? My suggestion is that we are not first, in fact i think we are a day late and a dollar short. Most people concentrate on planets, Terra forming the ones we have access to and star travel to find more to colonize and or Terra-form the ones we find around other stars...

 

I think this is a mistake and assumes that planets are the only place we can live or would desire to live, not only can we live in artificial habitats but such habitats would be far more compelling than alien planets. Alien planets might very well be dangerous, if the planet is filled with life enough like Earth for us to live there then we would have to worry about diseases and parasites but even something as common as allergenic particles could doom us. The long term effects of being exposed to alien viruses might doom any colonists just as surely as an immediately fatal disease.

 

Artificial space colonies would how ever be under our, if not complete control, at least some semblance of control since we would know the organisms we place inside and our relationship to them.

 

Such colonies would be space ships and once we mastered the ecology of enclosed environments star travel becomes a real possibility. To the inhabitants of such a hyper city (such colonies could enclose wilderness type areas as well) your proximity to a central star is less of a problem than if you have to live on a planet.

 

Pared down to fundamental necessities very nearly all stars are colonize able by this method and estimates of how long it takes one species to colonize the entire galaxy is a mere blink of an eye in terms of geological time or even the life span of a species. conservative estimates are in the hundreds of thousands of years to a few million at most.

 

This would seem to indicate that either one species colonizes the entire galaxy and excludes all others (which would indicate we are either nearly first or alone) or that different species can and do colonize the same stars, the resources are so abundant that warfare would only be an option to the most aggressive of species.

 

So this leads us to the possibility that a great many stars have been colonized by many different creatures over millennia. This is where the idea behind alien contact and religion comes in.

 

It is quite possible that either a series of alien species have colonized the region or that many have colonized our solar system concurrently with each other. Some of these aliens might have some concerns about what will happen when we achieve practical space travel and have either accidentally inspired religion or have intentionally experimented with manipulating us with the concept of religion.

 

This could explain why so many different aliens have been described in sightings and why aliens would seemingly do inconsequential things like landing in farmer Jones's field and not contacting us in any bigger manner when star travel seems to be such a daunting endeavor.

 

If they are already here and living in artificial colonies in the suns Kuiper Belt or Ort cloud visiting the earth isn't the huge investment in resources it would appear to be. In fact the Earths only interesting quality would be the possibility of collecting elements that are more concentrated in small areas on a planet like Gold or Copper.

 

Some reports have aliens using humans to mine such materials in very ancient times but even if this is not true the colonization of places like the ort cloud make good sense because everything needed to construct such colonies would be there, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and other elements contained in the ices of the bodies in the outer solar system.

 

An infrared telescope with the proper sensitivity should be able to detect such colonies with ease since getting rid of waste heat would be more of a problem than staying warm in the vacuum of space...

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Guest MacPhee

I'm not sure what payback we could give aliens with such powerful technologies

 

Don't underestimate what humans can do! I'd like to quote from Stephen King's 2001 SF novel "Dreamcatcher" (I hope this doesn't infringe copywrite - if it does, mods please delete the post).

 

In King's brilliant novel, Colonel Perlmutter responds to an alien invasion with these words (slightly altered):

 

"We are going to wipe these invading fundaments out, my friend, and if they ever come back to Terra Firma, we are going to rip off their collective gray head and excrete down their collective gray neck; if they persist, we will use their own technology, which we are already well on our way to grasping, against them, returning to their place of origin in their own ships, or ships like them built by General Electric and DuPont and Microsoft, and once there we will burn their cities or hives or goddam anthills, we'll napalm their amber waves of grain and nuke their purple mountains' majesty... we will pour the fiery pass of America into their lakes and oceans...we're going to do it because they came to the wrong neighborhood and knocked on the wrong fecking door."

 

I found this passage stirring, and inspiring. Can anyone read it, without feeling proud to be a human?

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Don't underestimate what humans can do! I'd like to quote from Stephen King's 2001 SF novel "Dreamcatcher" (I hope this doesn't infringe copywrite - if it does, mods please delete the post).

 

In King's brilliant novel, Colonel Perlmutter responds to an alien invasion with these words (slightly altered):

 

"We are going to wipe these invading fundaments out, my friend, and if they ever come back to Terra Firma, we are going to rip off their collective gray head and excrete down their collective gray neck; if they persist, we will use their own technology, which we are already well on our way to grasping, against them, returning to their place of origin in their own ships, or ships like them built by General Electric and DuPont and Microsoft, and once there we will burn their cities or hives or goddam anthills, we'll napalm their amber waves of grain and nuke their purple mountains' majesty... we will pour the fiery pass of America into their lakes and oceans...we're going to do it because they came to the wrong neighborhood and knocked on the wrong fecking door."

 

I found this passage stirring, and inspiring. Can anyone read it, without feeling proud to be a human?

 

 

it would be trivial for aliens who have mastered star travel to whack the planet with a few asteroids and stop any payback before it got off the planet....

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The idea of alien contact is extremely interesting and perhaps very telling, not necessarily about aliens but humans. I think UFOs are intimately connected with this, in historical times we went from seeing angels and demons to alien space craft but the descriptions are often very similar.

 

This stuff has been hashed out many times on this forum but while our historical ancestors might not have had photos of the things they saw they did indeed paint them, from cave walls to Renascence paintings people have been seeing things in the skies and drawing or painting them for a very long time.

 

In the late 1800's to early 1900's people saw sky ships with propellers and even anchors. Later they saw flying wings or discs, the battle of Los Angeles in 1941 was fought against glowing discs or airships depending on whether you are reading first hand accounts or accounts written later.

 

I know it's not good science but IF you assume these phenomena are real and not part of the human Psyche it begs the questions who, what, where, and why. I will attempt to, if not answer, at least define these questions..

 

Who? Aliens or the human mind? This is the central question to me, are these things real or products of the human mind? There is a third alternative, a natural occurrence but that still plays into the idea of a human minds interpretation of reality.

 

What? Lots of possibilities, from illusions created in the human mind to actual nuts and bolts space craft to multidimensional travelers, time travelers, and not to be ignored the possibility of natural phenomena.

 

 

 

interesting you say that, have you seen the video for, i think, mercades hydrogen fuel cell vehicle

 

it has a cloaking tecknology on it, you look at the picture and then it statics so you can see it

 

if peple saw ships with anchors and stuff, don't you think its possible for the cloaking tecknology to be similar, ?

 

where it show an idea that the mind can relate to

 

where a ship with ancors, would be taken as a travel ship

 

like a boat

 

where the mind and knowledge of the observer would be able to interprit it as such

 

think about how difficult communication is with a dog

 

they understand, but to what extent

 

also i think you are correct about the assumtion that only the most violent species would destroy life to expand theirs

 

problem then

 

if a supirior species communicated in set patterns

 

and we did not pass the test as a species ( or religion )

 

what kind of message would they give

 

 

 

kinda ore-gon

 

oregon

 

the mystery spot

 

where it seems that space time is bent within its realm

 

so

 

phylisophically speaking

 

does this mean that the ore needed to travel to the stars, within a minimal time,was taken from earth

 

think about it

 

we can detect co2 emmitted from cities in space

 

where detecting a element that had such a potential would be easy, if you knew of its existance

 

 

and why was the americas called the new world

 

so, on a grand scale of communication based on actions not words, defined with words to describe action

 

when the new world was found, the majority of the inhabitants and its civilization that was unique in and of itself,

 

was mostly destroyed

 

 

 

i know i reiterating a point ( see the movie "avatar" )

 

but is this their communication

 

did the people in the colonization times get jedi mid tricked to call it the new world

 

then did they get jedi mind tricked to call oregon oregon, and the oregon trail that it involved

 

 

 

i don't know

 

but it sure is a big coincidence

 

consider this

 

a nuclear bomb

 

wow, big stuff,

 

now, while the bomb we made was very devastating, but it eventually led to a free society

 

what if we made a bomb out of the ore that bends space time

 

and when it exploded, it sucked our entire planet through its hole and spewed it out the other end

 

that would be devastating

 

 

 

" note, never let your kids play with your headache, it might make it worse "

 

 

where in reality, i'm sure there are other reasons for these names being what they are

in the order that they are

 

 

 

i just hope we as humanity unite for love of life

 

not greed

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and i don't think they would leave us without hope,

 

like the grain of sand at the end of "the never ending story"

 

if the mystery spot is a real thing

mabe its a small as a grain of sand

 

somtimes small things have big effects

 

relativity....?

 

 

mabe the grain of sand is activated at the specific magnetic strength and fielld occuring at that lattitude and longitude

Edited by belovelife
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and i don't think they would leave us without hope,

 

like the grain of sand at the end of "the never ending story"

 

if the mystery spot is a real thing

mabe its a small as a grain of sand

 

somtimes small things have big effects

 

relativity....?

 

 

mabe the grain of sand is activated at the specific magnetic strength and fielld occuring at that lattitude and longitude

 

 

You do know that the Oregon vortex is nothing but over hyped horse feathers don't you?

 

http://www.randi.org/jr/101003.html

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