Revised Thoughts on ETs

After reading various posts on ETs, I think that if they did show up and their existence became common knowledge, then here are a few guiding points that you should follow.

1.) Just like any species, whether it be human, or any animal, not all ETs are the same. Some individuals may be hostile, others will be the total opposite. So there's no point arguing that they are peaceful or hostile when nothing at all is completely peaceful nor hostile, especially a species of say a few billion beings. Besides, how would you know what the perspectives are of a species as a whole? We do not know what most Americans or most Canadians or most Europeans feel because when we do surveys we only ask a sample portion which is not always accurate. Keeping that in mind we cannot say any species is evil or even good. We must ask in what we they are good, to whom they are good and in what way. We also must remember that the U.S Government cannot be trusted fully as well. There are too many examples to name. One more thing before I finish this thought, since when can you get the entire human species to agree on any one thing? You can't. What makes you think that they are any different? Besides, let’s just say that these species have governments or power structures. Power structures change and the question would be what the opinions or perspectives are of the key players during certain events. Just read into Jacques Ellul if you want to know what I’m referring to.


2.) Watch out for authors who make certain claims in their books about ETs or whatnot. The author's main goal usually is to make money. How can you make money? On one hand, by making people afraid. Fear, like sex, sells. David Icke is one of them. Besides trying to make a person afraid, he uses one little tidbit that often people who spread urban legends use. That is, giving people a tidbit of knowledge that most people don't have. That feeling of knowledge makes the person think that they are more enlightened than everybody else. The funny part of it is that many people exist that don't question the validity of such knowledge. Besides, examine the evidence of the author carefully as well. The evidence is usually scant or weak. Rarely is strong evidence provided. Watch out for people who try and recontextualize religion by encorporating UFO phenomena or extra-terrestrials in religion. Some honestly believe that Jesus was an extra terrestrial for instance. This is just foolish. When people write they write within their own context. You must understand the context of various historical periods and not recontextualize them towards our current understanding of life. 666 was not the Devil. 666 was Nero Caesar. It was illegal to criticize your political leaders, hence the Hebrew encoding system of Gematria was employed. Jesus Christ was 888. The Roman Empire was called Babylon. On the flip side, some recontextualize aliens as being angels or possible saviours. We cannot employ a primitive understanding of life to the present or even to the future.

3.) Quit using the bible for guidance on ETs. Anybody who studied Old and New Testament scholarship will see that the bible is a dead book. For anybody to see uniformity in the bible is like seeing uniformity in a newspaper. A newspaper consists of many sections, which each section having numerous authors. Do these authors share the same opinion on the same things? No. The difference with the bible though is it's like it was one edition of a newspaper that was put together over many centuries. If you want to read about the OT, read Lawrence Boadt or Walter Bruggemann, and for the NT read Bart D. Ehrman. Boadt argues that when the OT was written, that the rules for writing history were different than today. Today we want to find out directly what happened. Back then, the actual sequence of events was irrelevant, but people wanted to know what the spiritual message was behind such events. Bart Ehrman shows that Jesus, as agreed upon by most scholars (The jesus seminar is actually a minority of scholars and do not represent majority scholarly opinion) is that Jesus was a man who argued that the end of the world was going to happen during the lifetime of his apostles, read Mark 13 for proof. Regardless, the bible is absolutely no guide for ETs. I'm sorry to disappoint you biblethumpers out there.

So how should we deal with ETs?

1.) Remember that our perception of others is reflective of our perceptions of ourselves. The way an individual ET will deal with us is reflective of how he or she or it will deal with itself. The way we perceive ETs is the same as we perceive ourselves.

2.) Remember that when it comes to trust, that it works both ways. They must earn our trust and we must earn theirs. That will take time.

3.) Examine UFO and Abduction reports on a case by case basis. There could be abductions by ETs......the victims may be lying...the victims may be hallucinating...the CIA could have conducted such kidnappings in order to gain testing from humans............or these people may be part of a disinformation campaign on ETs in order to give ETs a bad reputation so that people will not attempt to subvert the government… a mixture of these different factors…we don't know. We have to examine these things case by case, and then develop a methodology for determining the truth, such as what can be multiply attested, polygraph tests and so forth.