Hey everyone,
we’ve heard from Lue Elizondo and others that there are parties in the pentagon working against disclosure because they think the “aliens” are “demons” or some similar interpretation.
In other discussions, people are wondering about the impact on the world religions in general, should aliens be revealed, and the “assurance” by institutions like the catholic church that they are fine with the existence of extraterrestrial life. It’s all divine creation, after all.
I don’t think it’s quite that easy.
There’s a scenario that has been discussed in many places, surrounding abductions or the idea that some of the species that comprise the phenomenon could “walk among us without being noticed”:
If the phenomenon made contact with the US government (or several world governments) and revealed that homo sapiens came about due to genetic engineering, or perhaps that life on earth came about due to seeding by the phenomenon, or some variant of this idea, the whole “divine creation” idea is out of the window, in various ways, and there is no saving it.
Even if the aliens (let’s just call them that as shorthand) are created by something or someone much more powerful than them, they are our creators. The direct link promised by many, many world religions is broken, and there is no wiggleroom. Even if, to focus just on christianity, the interpretation of genesis picks up on the plural in the third chapter “man has become like one of us” and tries to interpret the alien presence that way, it would still put the creator firmly in front of you. The supposedly “all powerful, all knowing, all loving” creator that was actually there the entire time.
I don’t think ontological shock captures the difficulty of this change. It appears, to me, to be akin to having been lied to about being an orphan and suddenly finding out that your parents have been next door the entire time. After all, if our creation originated with the aliens, whether they planted the seeds of our religions or not, a lot of the stories at the heart of those religions have to be either discarded, rewritten or painfully re-interpreted. There is no way to continue as if nothing changed.
Because then, there are no more mysterious ways. If we have contact, and they are our creators, we can go and ask god why.
Let that sink in for a bit.
The problem of evil. It makes a huge difference if the person you’re asking “why?” is not your fellow human being, but literally either a near omnipotent emissary or the actual creator themselves. In order for many of the world religions to maintain some core tenets of their faith, we have to be important in some way to the creator. Many religions have shifted the creator’s benevolent actions into the afterlife, “explaining” the creators absence and lack of intervention on this plane of existence. That applecart is turned upside down if we find out that the creator has been here the entire time.
Admittedly, maybe I’m going to get my atheist a$$ handed to me, and it’s all true, and all the good stuff happens after, I have to leave that option at least on the table. But I don’t give it a high probability and even if, I have many, many questions.
I think there are a whole bunch of other consequences here, such as for example that even if the aliens turn out to be the creators (or emissaries of one), not all of our stories and all of our value systems are the same. There are plenty of people who constantly claim, no, no, all religions are the same at heart, but that is just simply not true. Even if the aliens/emissaries align with a particular story, that will render a whole bunch of details of varying importance to millions of people obsolete.
That is something I don’t think we can easily absorb. People can barely tolerate being told that they’re wrong about a math problem – when it comes to something at the heart of their identity, all bets are off. There are so many adherents to so many religions, even if only 10% “lose their $hit” over this, it would be catastrophic.
Keen to hear your thoughts.
submitted by /u/Riboflavius
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