Aliens, Squirrels, Conspiracy and Society.

Alright, here’s a little mental exercise in sociology.

Imagine that you turn on the news and a UFO has just landed on the White House lawn and little gray aliens walked out and said that they come in peace. Would society as we know it end on that day? Many people think it would. But why?

Anyone who makes a habit of listening to late night talk radio knows that there’s a large group of people who think that aliens from other worlds exist and that they’ve been visiting Earth for thousands of years. Many believe that the world governments know all about it but are suppressing the information to keep the public in the dark. But why would they? It is a possibility that the governments wouldn’t want the public to know about something like that because they think that people would panic. Some think of it as a vast “cover up” based in some insidious effort to control the world’s population. Others think that it’s just such a rare thing that the governments may still be in the dark. There is no end to the theories surrounding this scenario.

In western civilizations many people believe that aliens could not exist because they think it would be contradictory to Judeo-Christian theology. I fail to see why and think of such lines of thought as bordering on faithlessness. Why would belief in extraterrestrials contradict western theology? Some people say it’s so because the bible never mentions aliens… At this, I like to point out that the Bible never mentions squirrels or penguins either but we have no problem believing in those. The next logical step in the argument is to say that the Bible couldn’t possibly mention all the different types of animals but it does mention animal kind, plants, human kind, and spiritual beings and those are the only types of life that God is accredited with creating in the Bible. God created Adam and Eve, not Adam, Eve, and E.T. At this, I would like to point to the story of Adam and Eve and note that they are only said to have had two children, and when they were of age, they left and found wives… So where did the wives come from? It’s clear that Adam and Eve weren’t the “first” humans, but only the first specifically named by God. The Bible isn’t so much of a history book as it is a family tree that follows one blood line, the blood line of Jesus. Adam and Eve were the first of this blood line, but we can clearly see that there were humans created on Earth before them. If Eden was a literal place, most experts theorize that it’s location would have been around the “fertile crescent”, and all the happenings of the Bible revolve around the same geographic region on Earth, around the Middle East. In fact, we can see that God’s “favorite” place on Earth is Jerusalem. Maybe “favorite” isn’t the right word, but it’s clear that he seems to focus on the location of Jerusalem quite a bit. When he speaks about the kingdom of heaven coming to Earth, he says that Jerusalem is where it will be located. Out of every place on this Earth, he has chosen this one location to focus on. Does that mean that no other place on Earth has meaning or could be reached by the salvation of Jesus? Clearly not.

It took a long time for the message of the gospel to reach other places on Earth. Distance from Jerusalem has never been a factor of salvation. Jesus died for the salvation of Native Americans, South American tribesmen, Australian Aborigines, and Alaskan Natives just the same way he died for members of the early church half a world away. Since distance isn’t a factor, wouldn’t it make sense that people on other planets would be treated the same as those from other continents on Earth? Who’s to say that there aren’t humans like you and me on other worlds? By this line of thought, it would seem that the Christian thing to do upon meeting extraterrestrials may be to convert them.

Even the Chief Astronomer of the Vatican has made the statement that belief in aliens isn’t contradictory to belief in God because they would still be the creation of God.

Getting back to the original line of thought here, it could be true that if the government is aware of aliens, they may actually want to disclose that information. Clearly, if aliens did exist, they don’t seem to be a threat to national security since they haven’t overthrown our world and enslaved us all yet. It would seem that if they can travel the cosmos, that they would also have the ability to make their presence known to all human kind regardless of what our governments think if they wanted to. By that line of thought it would seem that the aliens don’t want to be widely known, possibly for fear of how such a shock would be to our fragile civilization and they don’t want to interfere with our Earthly way of life. Something like the “prime directive” mentioned in Star Trek. This begs the question of how aliens would view our planet. Maybe not as another rock in the galaxy to conquer or study for some scientific gain, but as a sovereign nation of intelligent beings on the far side of the Milky Way neighborhood. They probably don’t take into account the belief or will of every individual on this planet, but view us more as a democracy. They may be waiting for the “majority” of Earthlings to call for contact with anyone who may be out there before they send an invitation to us to join the galactic housing committee. There are endless possibilities for why aliens may exist, why we wouldn’t be privy to that information, and that if they do exist that it really wouldn’t change life all that much as we know it.

The main point in this mental exercise is to decide for yourself how strong (or weak) society is. More importantly, how strong is your own belief in society when faced with something only slightly outside of our collective civil norm. Society may just fall apart. But if it does or doesn’t it will be the result of the individual’s own ability or inability to hold onto their own beliefs and self-identity when faced with something “alien” to their view of civilization. In short, my example of “aliens” is just a metaphor for any form of civil unrest.

The truth is out there… And it lies within yourself.