reply to post by Malevolent_Aliens
What an incredibly complex question.
This goes far beyond the simple clarification of what we term "god", and starts to delve into personal belief and the accepted paradigms of the
divine. You'll get no definitive answer, obviously, but individual responses that'll encompass every facet of faith, whether scientific or
supernatural. Because of that, be prepared for vociferous, well thought out opinions mixing with incoherent, baseless ramblings.
After all, you're asking if religion, in
all forms, are compatible...
Is God ET?
This is
my opinion...
Setting aside all emotional and spiritual differences of how we identify the divine allows us to ask a question of ourselves: can you permit yourself
to see god all around you?
Some will say yes joyously, and do so through solid trust in their particular creed, even if they don't understand their own teachings entirely.
They've heard the revealed knowledge of wise men, and the messages of belonging and promise contained within those words imparted upon them a little
measure of testament, therefore it's true.
Others will scream no, and back up their arguement with hard facts and weighty research done by others, even if they don't understand the data
entirely. But it must be true, because important, learned people whom we have to trust because they further our knowledge say so.
What they're both doing is ignoring the simple fact that we're part of an existence far stranger than anything we can, or ever will, imagine. To try
and cope with such profound oddness, to try and make some sense of it all, we have created our own explanations and compartmentalized observations and
experiences into understandable, coherent forms that individually solve the problem nicely. For most, that is.
How did I answer? I said yes. But I fit into neither camp.
Religion is a much evolved form of the interpretation of terrifying natural events and unexplainable mysteries that were once far beyond our
comprehension.
Some of our antecedents, seeing a powerful stage upon which to voice emerging concepts, focused this fear towards an indentifiable, though no less
incredible, source. Man knowlingly created the gods to explain nature.
What we didn't realise, however, was that we'd almost hit the nail on the head and sure enough science followed rapidly as the result of our
enquiring minds sensing that there was much more beyond even mystical clarifications.
Now, we're doing the same when we witness UFOs and look upon them with the same eyes as our earliest ancestors would have fire, birth and death.
We can't comprehend these lights in the skies fully and become frightened because they're beyond our control. Looking on their conveyances with
wonder, we surmise as to the extent of their capabilities, how far advanced they are, what miracles they can perform.
We project personas onto them, call them angel and demon, saviour and conqueror. We're still, after all these millenia, trying to explain the
unexpalinable as best we can given limited understanding.
And once again, the cycle continues...
Some proffess intimate knowledge of these visitors' intentions, and have gained many loyal followers. How many threads on ATS allude to beatific
alien's "channelled" messages of love. Others tell of evil reptillians who plot to enslave Earth. Scholarly discourses abound as to the alien's
technology, each advocating intense familiarity with the inbelievable.
Yet, though drowning in what may be psuedo-info, we ignore the obvious; until they land
enmass, step up to the awaiting forest of microphones
and explain themselves, we simply don't know what, or who, they are.
But we do know this: at this very moment they are part of our existence, and uncomfortable as that is, we have to recognize that as part of our weird
Universe.
But how does it relate to God?
The more we delve into physics, the deeper the subject becomes. Einstein coined the phrase "spooky at a distance" to descibe quantum entanglement.
This was patently designed to diffuse more than to explain. Yet, the implication is there. Even the mightiest men of science can bear witness to the
strangeness of life, and Albert knew how important it was to recognise it. He said:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
and again, his opinion as to this high-strangeness's provenance was clear:
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with
our frail and feeble mind.
Einstein saw that God is in the detail.
Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
How does this apply to the question posed in the opening post?
Giving a positive answer to my question is not neccesarily an admission of belief, but is an admission that it's possible to open the mind to the
reality that the material world we inhabit is not as "nuts and bolts" as we think.
To truly participate in this theatre of life, to play our parts well and therefore pay due homage to our ancestors' struggles, which resulted in the
world we now inhabit, we have to accept that there is more to life, more to the idea of creation, than we know.
That includes
all living things.
Is ET God?
No, but they may well be closer to Him than we are.