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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.
Well, the good news is that we found out Jesus is worshiped on other planets.
Robert J. Sawyer did a send up of mocking religious people's views on ET in his novel Calculating God . An alien lands on Earth and finds it odd that all the scientists of our planet are trending towards atheism, when his civilization finds the arguments of natural theology convincing. Of course, the god believed in by the alien (and mused on by Sawyer, who I believe remains an atheist) is an unknowable, silent, watchmaker god who sprung up spontaneously from the quantum vacuum, instead of the personal God that Earth's big three monotheistic religions believe in.
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.
Being able to detect planets and being able to detect life on those planets are 2 different things.
C.S. Lewis, Anglican and actually closer to Catholicism in theology, wrote, from 1938-1945, a science fiction trilogy known as the Space Trilogy that explores alien races in the context of Christianity.
I first read the trilogy when I was an atheist, and it helped remove that particular hurdle in my later study of the world religions that lead to my conversion to Catholicism.
And the answer is "How many logical fallacies can you fit into a paragraph." *ding ding ding*
Perhaps "I'd like Trolling Slashdot for 1000", and the answer is "Mention Religion in a summary, more than one preferably"
No, discussing alien life is not "new" and no, this is not some interesting twist on the discussion. Claiming that "we are going to find alien life by XXXX date" is akin to claiming "the world is going to end by XXXX date". I don't believe in your tarot cards, your phrenology, or what ever else you claim gives you the power to see the future. We all know that the potential is there, but.. well you can read the definition of the word on your own.
You hopefully stopped reading when the guy correlates finding planets with finding life, knowing it was a troll.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
I'll listen very carefully. A civilization that has managed to get across the interstellar gulf alive, and chooses to tell us about some religion, well, I'll listen to them with full attention, and as open a mind as I can manage.
And I'll also listen very politely.
--PeterM
Perhaps not 1700 years ago, but by mid 13th century, Thomas Aquinas had already pondered these questions
i *had* a low uid, but lost it in my lawn
christian theologists? but those guys working on these questions 1700 years ago worked it out wrong for current crop of christians.
now.. are christians ready for that the bible is not literal? some are, some are not. if they're biblical literalists(which is silly, if you read the fucking book) then yeah, aliens are a problem - however if you're a biblical literalist in the modern day then NOTHING is a problem. why is nothing a problem? because you can always invent ways around shit, from "god did it to test faith" to "before the flood animals were bigger, hence the dinosaur bones you can find in mountain ranges".
if you're religious enough you twist your observations to fit whatever you chose before making those observations.. I think it's a silly question to ask if the world religions are ready for ET when they're technically not ready to account for observations made on the earth even.
futhermore, those religions are mutually in disagreement with each other.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They are what I term, Tupac-Christians. It's where you wear a gold chain and cross and you talk about 'god' and such, but you've only got a few toes in the pool of faith and you spend 99% of your time contradicting the faith. From my experience, most people that call themselves Christians fit this model, and most people that I would think are adhering closely to Jesus/Bible, would say that those other people are not real Christians.