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Are the World's Religions Ready For ET?
Science_afficionado writes: At the current rate of discovery, astronomers will have identified more than a million exoplanets by the year 2045. That means, if life is at all common in the Milky Way, astronomers could soon detect it. Realization that the nature of the debate about life on other worlds is about to fundamentally change, lead Vanderbilt astronomer David Weintraub to begin thinking seriously about how people will react to such a discovery. He realized that people's reactions will be heavily influenced by their religious beliefs, so he decided to find out what theologians and leaders from the world's major religions have to say about the matter. The result is a book titled Religions and Extraterrestrial Life, published by Springer this month. He discovered that from Baptists to Buddhists, from Catholics to Mormons, from Islam to the Anglican Communion, religious views on alien life differ widely.
Religion is something that an ET might bring. It could be in the form of creation myths, some strange gap they discovered in physics and a religion built up around it. Or they may have always had a religion that drove them to pursue physics with a fanatic's zeal resulting in space travel while not straying from their core faith.
Or even worse, they could be way ahead of us in pretty much every science yet have a fanatical religion where the two options are pretty much to pray to some god or spread out and convert other species.
Another nasty variation is that they come with some religion that has a series of logical arguments that can pretty much convince anyone who doesn't have a PhD in rhetoric. So they come along drop off their book of faith and leave.
But if they do come with any religion at all we can all be certain that it will end up with adherents on Earth. Seeing that we have Neo Nazis there is no creed too stupid for some people.