TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director
24 November 2008

More people believe in aliens and ghosts than in God, a new survey finds, according to a British newspaper.

The survey, however, was done by a marketing firm in conjunction with the release of an X-Files DVD, and details of how the poll was conducted were not reported in the Daily Mail. Survey questions, depending on how they are written, can greatly skew results, along with how subjects are sampled.

That said, the poll of 3,000 people found that 58 percent believe in the supernatural, including paranormal encounters, while 54 percent believe God exists. Women were more likely than men to believe in the supernatural and were also more likely to visit a medium.

A survey of U.S. college students done in 2006 found 23 percent of freshmen had a general belief in paranormal concepts — from astrology to communicating with the dead. Interestingly, the number jumped to 31 percent among seniors and 34 percent among graduate students.

Researchers who have compared various human belief systems say our tendency to believe is deeply rooted.

Religion and belief in the paranormal are not linked as one might imagine. A handful of surveys show just the opposite, in fact.

Labels: aliens, belief, ghosts, God, paranormal, Robert Roy Britt

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Saturday, August 02, 2008

Could Aliens Become Spiritual Mentors?

C. L. Talmadge
author@greenstoneofhealing.com

LANCASTER, Texas, July 28 /Christian Newswire/ --

Is our society about to acknowledge the existence of aliens?

A second credible member of the public has spoken out on the topic. Just last week former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell, speaking on BBC Radio, said aliens exist and have been observing earth for "quite some time."

In a May interview with Italian newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's chief astronomer, the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, said there is no conflict between believing in extraterrestrial intelligent life and believing in God.

"How can we exclude that life has developed elsewhere?" Rev Funes asked, even implying that some aliens might not have been subject to the separation from God described in Genesis. "There could be (other beings) who remained in full friendship with their creator."

Any extended discussion, apart from the existence question, about intelligent non-human life heretofore has been limited primarily to speculative fiction. Most works in these genres eschew any direct talk of spirituality, religion, or faith, alien or human.

There are some exceptions, however, and if our society is now more open to aliens, then a look at how we have portrayed alien faith and spirituality is worthwhile.

Enemy Mine, a 1985 science fiction film derived from an award-winning novella, depicts an intergalactic war between human beings and an alien race called the Drac. Marooned on an isolated, inhospitable planet, a Drac and a man start off as enemies. Out of survival necessity, however, they make a wary peace and eventually become dear friends.

The Drac shows a sense of his own spirituality and the divine, reading frequently from a small book of religious/philosophical text, and pondering the larger questions of life.

Ultimately, the alien's faith and friendship motivate the human being to consider something other than his prestige as a top-scoring fighter pilot. The alien reminds the human that life is so much more than just a scramble for conquest and material success. The human being is much better off for having encountered an alien of great faith and courage.

An example of fantasy that directly addresses alien spirituality is the Green Stone of Healing epic series. It features an intelligent non-human being, a Mist-Weaver, who exhibits capabilities that human beings more readily ascribe to the supernatural. The Mist-Weaver is able to appear and dissolve at will, transitioning from material to non-material realities in much the same manner as the divine heralds of earthly religious traditions.

As would an angel, the Mist-Weaver assumes physical form to converse easier with the human characters. The Mist-Weaver clearly has a profound sense of the divine and his connection to it and to all life, and tries to encourage that spiritual connection in his human counterparts.

The Mist-Weaver's presence spurs his human students to examine the limitations of their faith and their spiritual understanding, just as the burning bush, signaling God's presence, presented Moses with challenges of faith and self-growth.

His spiritual teachings often leave the human beings baffled, however, because they are so different from human understanding. The Mist-Weaver never tries to dictate human behavior or beliefs, solve human problems, or protect his students from the consequences of their actions.

In taking a hands-off approach, he might seem indifferent to some, but the Mist-Weaver simply refuses to intervene out of his abiding respect for free will. Perhaps that's what makes this alien truly strange. The Mist-Weaver doesn't suffer from that all-too-human inclination to run other people's lives or to proclaim God as a similar micro-manager.

A third example of speculative fiction portraying intelligent non-human beings with a highly developed spirituality is Alien Nation. Most of these on-screen "Newcomers" are just regular folks, although there are villains in their midst, too. But the average alien Joes and Jills have jobs, houses, children, and try to live peacefully among their human counterparts. They also have extensive religious rituals and traditions that are depicted throughout the TV series.

Like Enemy Mine and the Green Stone of Healing series, Alien Nation asserts that non-human beings can teach the human variety a thing or two about life and spirituality. The Newcomer police officer is paired with a human detective who is initially very unhappy about the arrangement. But the former earns the latter's respect and affection through his courage, smarts, initiative, and loyalty. The Newcomer demonstrates that these enduring and spiritual character qualities are not the sole province of human beings. Again, the human being is better off for having known the alien.

Tragically, on earth today the concepts of spirituality and faith seem far more alien to many than does the assertion of intelligent non-human beings.

Aliens may give God far more credit than we do. If/when the day comes that we openly encounter intelligent non-human beings, we may find that the experience brings us much closer to reclaiming and living our own spirituality than we ever believed possible.

We can always choose to embrace the unknown--the alien--instead of fearing it.

Labels: aliens, C. L. Talmadge, spirituality

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Friday, May 16, 2008

The Vatican and Little Green Men

Thursday, May 15, 2008 2:10 PM
Sharon Begley

In the long interview he gave the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano yesterday, Father José Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit priest from Argentina, called the existence of extraterrestrials a real possibility. “Astronomers contend that the universe is made up of a hundred billion galaxies, each of which is composed of hundreds of billions of stars,” he correctly noted. (The interview was headlined The Extra-terrestrial Is My Brother.) “Many of these, or almost all of them, could have planets. [So] how can you exclude that life has developed somewhere else?”

For all the attention they got, however, Funes’ comments do not exactly break new ground, as my colleague Edward Pentin, who covers the Vatican for Newsweek, points out. In 2005 Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno wrote a 50-page booklet, Intelligent Life in the Universe, published by the Catholic Truth Society, in which he makes the standard astronomical points—lots of galaxies, lots of stars, some with planets, some of which may have conditions conducive to life. (Theological question: can God create life only in places with the right conditions? Or could He create life where there is, for instance, no water, or where the temperatures are too hot or too cold? If not, why not?).

But the Vatican has never denied the findings of contemporary astronomy, which is now up to 288 “extrasolar” planets (that is, those that orbit a star beyond our own solar system), including one whose atmosphere contains organic molecules, the ingredients of life, as I blogged in March. As Consolmagno put it, “There is nothing in Holy Scripture that could confirm, or contradict, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe,” which means that telescopes and not the bible will be the only reliable guide to the question.

In asking whether little green men might be guilty of original sin, we are obviously in the realm of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” But the theologian astronomers don’t blink. Fr. Funes said he was sure that, if aliens needed redemption, they “in some way, would have the chance to enjoy God’s mercy.” Consolmagno was more explicit: there’s no problem in getting the Son of God to every planet with ETs because, as Christians accept every Sunday during the Holy Eucharist, “Christ is truly, physically present in a million places, and sacrificed a million times, every day at every sacrifice of the Mass.”

So if the Catholic Church has accepted the possibility of aliens for a while now, why the high-profile interview in the Vatican newspaper? Applying the techniques of Kremlinology to St. Peter’s, Edward Pentin’s sources tell him it might be part of a push to demonstrate the Vatican’s embrace of science (in 1992 it apologized for that whole unfortunate Galileo mess, after all). Toward the end of the interview, Fr. Funes called science and religion “two allies which elevate the human spirit. There can be tensions or conflicts, but we mustn’t be afraid. The Church mustn’t fear science and its discoveries.”

Interestingly, the Vatican has plans to host a conference in Rome next spring to mark the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the theory of evolution. Conference organizers say it will look beyond entrenched ideological positions—including misconstrued creationism. The Vatican says it wants to reconsider the problem of evolution “with a broader perspective” and says an “appropriate consideration is needed more than ever before.”

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, the Church has often been in science’s corner. The telescopes of the Vatican Observatory are perched on the roof of the Pope’s summer home in Caste1 Gandolfo, and Jesuits were for centuries Europe’s leading astronomers. “Seventeenth-century Jesuits invented the reflecting telescope and the wave theory of light,” Consolmagno pointed out. “In the 18th century they ran a quarter of all the astronomical observatories in Europe.” And it was Georges Lemaitre, a priest, who in 1927 deduced from Einstein’s equations of general relativity that the universe is expanding—and that it therefore began in a Big Bang. It will be fascinating to see if the Vatican is now enlisting in the battle to defend science from its growing legions of attackers.

Labels: aliens, extraterrestrials, science, Sharon Begley, Vatican