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Well sure. Most mono theistic religions will struggle to incorporate alien life. Alas fundamentalist Christianity has a sufficiently ill-defined theology that i

by scrubs 3y ago

Well sure. Most mono theistic religions will struggle to incorporate alien life. Alas fundamentalist Christianity has a sufficiently ill-defined theology that it can incorporate most anything despite the fact the old testament creation story says nothing about alien civilizations in any meaningful way. Consistency with completeness have never been a pressing problem for it.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
I suspect the fear is a wee bit more primal, as in native Americans viewing European ships.
Amezarak 3y ago
If you're willing to accept the existence of magic, physics-defying UFOs, then at least some fundamentalists seem equally well grounded in providing an entirely different non-spacefaring-alien explanation for them. At any rate, I don't think anyone claims to offer a complete explanation for everything that exists.
- scrubs 3y ago
  Maybe your rain check with evangelical Christians has expired? By construction, by definition in their mind God is cause and explanation fir everything and the 66 books of the Bible is the bona-fide bottom line as they see it. And most cases it's literal truth.
  - Amezarak 3y ago
    God is the ultimate cause for everything, but that doesn't make it "complete" or mean it claims to be complete or anyone claims it to be complete, anymore than anyone would claim the Big Bang makes physics complete. The evangelical line is that the bible is both true and sufficient to understand all you need to know for salvation, not that it's sufficient to understand everything. All phenomena are not claimed to be explained or even described. But that's really beside the point, the point is that, with our current level of scientific knowledge, believing in FTL aliens who are zipping around Earth and performing other stunts in violation of the known laws of physics is not different than believing in magic and demons. The only thing that's changed is your interpretive lens - one has a lot more cachet in a world where science fiction is more read than theology.
    - scrubs 3y ago
      The evangelical line --- since we're post new Testament --- is we're in end times. Satan will take over eventually, and at any time final judgement will occur which is why salvation is a pressing issue. It's a apocalyptic stance that for some (certainly not all) creates a nasty dis-association with the here and now. After all if heaven/hell was always the only point, then this life is like a Las Vegas weekend. It's not our place, not our home and in 72hrs we're out anyway. I wrote before evangelical theology is sufficiently ill-defined such that it can incorporate major changes in understanding which is a kind of consistency problem. Nobody with a dose of common sense about the prevailing attitudes in monotheistic religions would say detection of non-earth based life changes nothing. The old testament creation story is all earth centered, and all earth-man centered all the time. You might enjoy Ken Wilbur's "Quantum Questions" in this context. He writes a mini biography on all the major 20th century scientists many of whom held a spiritual core although (as far as I can remember) not an American evangelical line. I think the book makes a good point. No scientist uses science as means to prove or disprove God/theology. And no scientists uses the Bible to disprove or prove rational facts about the world we live in. Either way it's a corruption of the other. Nonetheless the evangelical line and its literal take on the new Testament is what it is. There is no God. We're not living in end-times. Satan doesn't exist. Final judgement isn't pending. Salvation is an unforced problem. And no proof of aliens or even bacterial life off-earth is demonstrated with rational evidence. This brings us to a world more like Camus'. Existence is absurd. Meaning is living a full live despite the absurdness of it akin to Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill to have to retrieve it when it rolls down and push it up again. Our job is to make something of that while we can.
      - Amezarak 3y ago
        > Nobody with a dose of common sense about the prevailing attitudes in monotheistic religions would say detection of non-earth based life changes nothing. I like Camus, and most would categorize my philosophical beliefs as some breed of Nietzschean, but I think it's very important to develop a deep an understanding of other attitudes as possible, and I don't think this is generally true. For example, CS Lewis is widely loved by evangelicals [1] and he literally wrote fiction laying out how he thought aliens would fit within that cosmology[2]. There is really nothing in particular that would change theologically. Of course it may change things culturally. More interesting to me, and what I was referencing, is that many evangelicals (and others, famously the orthodox Seraphim Rose) interpret UFO activity as spiritual phenomena, and attribute it to demons. Some of these works are certainly thought-provoking, if you can suspend your preconceptions going into them. [3] Certainly if I am to believe in the reality of the underlying incidents and were forced at gunpoint to attribute it to intelligent entities, I actually find the idea of "demons messing with people because they hate us" more persuasive than the absurd utopian idea that aliens are using their magic tech to fly across the galaxy so they can "uplift" us or any of the other nonsensical motivations usually given. [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-man-thinking-cs-lewis_b_835747 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-man-thinking-cs-lewis_b_8... [2] His space trilogy. [3] Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future in particular has an interesting chapter or two about this. What I found particularly intriguing is the idea that the actual incidents are not actually new, with descriptions of historical parallels, and we're simply interpreting ancient phenomena in a different way due to cultural changes, and the brief analysis of the psychological impact of UFOs, which is almost uniformly very negative to witnesses.

by scrubs 3y ago

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

I suspect the fear is a wee bit more primal, as in native Americans viewing European ships.

Amezarak 3y ago

If you're willing to accept the existence of magic, physics-defying UFOs, then at least some fundamentalists seem equally well grounded in providing an entirely different non-spacefaring-alien explanation for them. At any rate, I don't think anyone claims to offer a complete explanation for everything that exists.

scrubs 3y ago
Maybe your rain check with evangelical Christians has expired? By construction, by definition in their mind God is cause and explanation fir everything and the 66 books of the Bible is the bona-fide bottom line as they see it. And most cases it's literal truth.
- Amezarak 3y ago
  God is the ultimate cause for everything, but that doesn't make it "complete" or mean it claims to be complete or anyone claims it to be complete, anymore than anyone would claim the Big Bang makes physics complete. The evangelical line is that the bible is both true and sufficient to understand all you need to know for salvation, not that it's sufficient to understand everything. All phenomena are not claimed to be explained or even described. But that's really beside the point, the point is that, with our current level of scientific knowledge, believing in FTL aliens who are zipping around Earth and performing other stunts in violation of the known laws of physics is not different than believing in magic and demons. The only thing that's changed is your interpretive lens - one has a lot more cachet in a world where science fiction is more read than theology.
  - scrubs 3y ago
    The evangelical line --- since we're post new Testament --- is we're in end times. Satan will take over eventually, and at any time final judgement will occur which is why salvation is a pressing issue. It's a apocalyptic stance that for some (certainly not all) creates a nasty dis-association with the here and now. After all if heaven/hell was always the only point, then this life is like a Las Vegas weekend. It's not our place, not our home and in 72hrs we're out anyway. I wrote before evangelical theology is sufficiently ill-defined such that it can incorporate major changes in understanding which is a kind of consistency problem. Nobody with a dose of common sense about the prevailing attitudes in monotheistic religions would say detection of non-earth based life changes nothing. The old testament creation story is all earth centered, and all earth-man centered all the time. You might enjoy Ken Wilbur's "Quantum Questions" in this context. He writes a mini biography on all the major 20th century scientists many of whom held a spiritual core although (as far as I can remember) not an American evangelical line. I think the book makes a good point. No scientist uses science as means to prove or disprove God/theology. And no scientists uses the Bible to disprove or prove rational facts about the world we live in. Either way it's a corruption of the other. Nonetheless the evangelical line and its literal take on the new Testament is what it is. There is no God. We're not living in end-times. Satan doesn't exist. Final judgement isn't pending. Salvation is an unforced problem. And no proof of aliens or even bacterial life off-earth is demonstrated with rational evidence. This brings us to a world more like Camus'. Existence is absurd. Meaning is living a full live despite the absurdness of it akin to Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill to have to retrieve it when it rolls down and push it up again. Our job is to make something of that while we can.
    - Amezarak 3y ago
      > Nobody with a dose of common sense about the prevailing attitudes in monotheistic religions would say detection of non-earth based life changes nothing. I like Camus, and most would categorize my philosophical beliefs as some breed of Nietzschean, but I think it's very important to develop a deep an understanding of other attitudes as possible, and I don't think this is generally true. For example, CS Lewis is widely loved by evangelicals [1] and he literally wrote fiction laying out how he thought aliens would fit within that cosmology[2]. There is really nothing in particular that would change theologically. Of course it may change things culturally. More interesting to me, and what I was referencing, is that many evangelicals (and others, famously the orthodox Seraphim Rose) interpret UFO activity as spiritual phenomena, and attribute it to demons. Some of these works are certainly thought-provoking, if you can suspend your preconceptions going into them. [3] Certainly if I am to believe in the reality of the underlying incidents and were forced at gunpoint to attribute it to intelligent entities, I actually find the idea of "demons messing with people because they hate us" more persuasive than the absurd utopian idea that aliens are using their magic tech to fly across the galaxy so they can "uplift" us or any of the other nonsensical motivations usually given. [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-man-thinking-cs-lewis_b_835747 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-man-thinking-cs-lewis_b_8... [2] His space trilogy. [3] Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future in particular has an interesting chapter or two about this. What I found particularly intriguing is the idea that the actual incidents are not actually new, with descriptions of historical parallels, and we're simply interpreting ancient phenomena in a different way due to cultural changes, and the brief analysis of the psychological impact of UFOs, which is almost uniformly very negative to witnesses.