Thanks are mainly due to Penman, Aleo, for the sources.
It’s a little-appreciated bit of history that Christians embraced the possibility of ET life almost as soon as it became feasible under Copernicanism. And they did so from Christian considerations more than the then-prevalent philosophical principle of plenitude.
One bugbear of mine, though, that’s worth raising in the light of thabo’s comments, is the strange fixation of NASA and the media that the discovery of the possibility of the building blocks of life (continue conjecture ad nauseam!) might lead to us “no longer being alone in the universe”. Six billion fellow humans to love is scarcely “alone”!
One question I want to ask is what about the people who were supposedly abducted by Aliens and the aliens would start to panic or something if they said Jesus’ name. what do you make of that? Is it all in the head or do you think Aliens are demons? Honestly, i want Aliens to be real but you can’t have everything you want, but still Aliens would be so cool so I want to know of these alien abductions are all in the head.
Also some others i forget, but they say that the “aliens” or as some Christians think “demons” they freak out when Jesus is mentioned. I have read some pages like these below that seem to make the abductions more in the head than actual physical abductions
I would love to hear everyone’s insight on this. Again, I think Aliens, like in Star Trek, would be the coolest thing ever, But I constantly hear from Christians that they are Actually demons.
People who claim to see aliens or be abducted by them are delusional. And multiple people can share in the same delusion. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there that NASA has to debunk.
Thanks. I have been kinda confused with that. i too believe they are just delusional. Another thing is what about Ezekiel 1? Is that a UFO or something? It seems to not since it is a vision form God, but idk exactly. Also, Thanks for the help.
ya, I too have come to that conclusion. is there any Bible references to UFOs possibly? I have heard Aliens helped build the pyramids in Egypt but we don’t have proof of that, still it seems pretty cool, but ya. Is there any verses that could refer to UFOs?
I mean that sometimes we are so anxious to find something in the Bible that validates our beliefs about whatever, that we find it. Even when it isn’t really there!
We as humans have many frailties. One we pretty much all fall prey to is confirmation bias: we see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, even if it is not true. Some of these people are immersed in the culture so deeply that to deny what they believe about aliens or conspiracies oe even essential oils would be very painful, so they chose not to do so.
Another common problem we have is falling under the influence of secondary gain. That is, we get something out of whatever (alien abductions, drugs, book sales etc.) and it makes us feel good. It may be money, attention, acceptance, purpose in life or other things. That leads people to have behaviors and make claims that may not seem reasonable.
In any case we should be aware that we have these tendencies, and guard ourselves against being led astray by false teachers both in our secular an spiritual lives.
A shamefaced word of testimony. In my misspent youth (I’m talking 55 years ago) I became obsessed with UFOlogy to the extent that even now I remember the library code for books on the subject. I believed all the alien contact stories (nobody got abducted till much later) and it also seemed a neat explanation for all that religious stuff - Jesus would have been a benevolent alien, and of course Ezekiel’s vision was a classic flying saucer misinterpreted by a primitive Hebrew (DarkX_Studios may be interested that the claim originated in the book Desmond Leslie wrote with the now debunked George Adamski in 1953).
A while later I became a Christian, and now knowing who Jesus really was, the rest of the garbage gradually dropped away. My regret is how evangelistic I was about the whole subject at school: I’ve often wondered if the rather sad “Men in Black conspiracy” period off the band the Stranglers around 1981 may have been partly my fault, since I had sat next to their bass player for years and often bent his ear about it.
The bottom line, I suppose, is that the Bible is the constant experience of God by entire peoples (Israel and later the Christian Church) over millennia, shared by billions of people since. Ezekiel’s vision is about the God we can know in Christ - none of it depends on a hole-in-corner “sighting” or fuzzy photographs of Frisbees.
PS I didn’t get much “secondary gain” from being a “true believer” in UFOs - just a bit of stick from skeptical schoolmates. It’s the opportunists who write the books who make the profits - though the rather sad story of how much a prank fake photo damaged the life of a schoolboy shows how tangled these things get.
That’s interesting. Same thing did happen to me a couple years ago, I was a Christian (still am) but I became interesting in UFOlogy. After a bit I wasnt focused on Jesus that much. Eventually I stopped the UFOlogy stuff because it affected my faith at the time. This was when I was a young earth creationist with a mindset that anything against my view would lead to atheism or something false. Last year I started to really study the Bible and Ive learned things about, Creation and the book of Revelation, that I never knew and that a lot of Christians might not believe, which isnt as important as Christ himself, so whether you have 1 view of creation or 1 view of revelation it isnt that important as long as you believe in Jesus Christ. But I now know how to study things (like UFOs) and even accept them (if they still fit the Bible) as well as keep my faith in Jesus. I used to think accepting Evolution and science would lead atheism (as people like Ken Ham like to say) But my faith is stronger now, by accepting Evolution, than it was before. As for UFOs and Aliens, it wouldn’t change a thing for me. God would’ve created them too.
Well, fortunately I was never troubled by the conflict of Young Earth Creationism, as it was never an issue in 1960s England (and is still much less of one here than in the US). Oddly enough, my UFO aberration probably arose more from a rather hard-nosed priggish scientism: my “academic” intererests were zoology, palaeontology and astronomy, and my light reading science fiction (funny how even many serious NASA people seem enthralled with those fantasies as if they were trying to live out the dream on taxpayers’ money!).
UFOs seemed to me to be the science fiction promising to turn into real science - hence my ability to be completely blind to the religious message of the Bible, and to read “sciency” ETs into it. Fortunately the Holy Spirit had more clout than either George Adamski or Ray Bradbury in the end.
Does anyone thing that if Aliens are real that God could’ve used them? Im just wondering. Im kinda curious about everything. It seems to make sense either way. I mean the Bible never really desribes UFOs or anything. But Idk, maybe we missed something. Im just thinking out loud.
