Gods, Aliens, and Humanity

Over time, languages change drastically, but the messages continue to be the same because the people speaking them think the same things. It’s interesting how semantics play such an important role in religion.

Take the word, “god.” Can anyone describe precisely what a god is? There not countless descriptions from the past to pull from, yet is there is no way of verifying the authenticity of any of them.

There is another phenomenon that is similar to this: aliens. Sure, the concept is perhaps approached differently, but are aliens and gods are not to dissimilar. We cannot see them unless they reveal themselves, so their appearance as of yet is unverifiable. Oddly enough, they also come from the sky (though obviously not all gods are sky gods).

One interesting connection is that the brain can be stimulated to create a religious experience, but this experience is described by atheists and agnostics not as religious, but as akin to an alien abduction (or the presence of a relative, either alive or dead).

This should make sense to anyone who studies religion: theism and ancestor worship are mainstays of many major faiths. Even Scientology taps into this new connection with the addition of aliens (and to some extent, Mormonism does as well).

One of the more depressing trends shared by both is the tendency of humanity to attribute human progress to both gods and aliens. Religions the world over say that mankind was given everything by the gods, from life itself to the land we inhabit to skills like writing and farming, even the plants and animals.

Today, one common belief is that alien spaceships recovered by humans sparked the technological boom of the 20th century. How little respect for humanity must you have in order to believe such a cop-out?

The basic premise of this mentality is simple: we are too dumb to come up with anything on our own. Humanity is flawed, this much is true, but this does not mean humanity is not capable of collectively working together towards progress. Not only does this insult those people who accomplished such amazing things, it makes no logical sense.

If humanity is doomed, what made the aliens so special? If we couldn’t come up with any of this on our own, how did alien civilizations do it? Frankly, if a race of beings thousands or even millions of years ahead of us are helping out, I’m not too impressed with the results.

Moreover, why would an alien race help us? You’re telling me that once a species attains the ability to travel between stars, they go around helping the inhabitants of other planets? It’s a fun idea, but I imagine they’d be looking for more systems to which they can expand for resources… in which case, we’re nothing but savages to be exploited.

If you went out into the jungle and found a chimp, would you teach it to make fire? More than likely, you would ignore it. I imagine this is what aliens that pass by our solar system would do.

Maybe I just don’t feel the romanticism in the notion of being selected by more powerful beings, or maybe I just have some pride in my species’ ability to develop on its own.