[Dion]

Originally Posted by Cowboy89

It's kinda funny how posters who routinely crap on the religious every chance they get are in here in the UFO thread believing in aliens using the same logic theologians use to describe their faith.

What would religious leaders do if aliens showed up?

When I raised the possibility of extraterrestrial life to Reggie Blount, a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he shared a verse from the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians: “We look through a mirror dimly.” For Blount and many Christians, the full reality of God’s creation will be forever obscure to human beings, like opaque glass. As Blount sees it, in a universe containing a potentially infinite number of galaxies, aliens may very well exist. “But,” he emphasizes, “I don’t think other intelligent beings would change our relationship to God.”

In his book Religions and Extraterrestrial Life, astronomer David Weintraub describes this capacity of modern religions to evolve and adapt: “Historically, some religions have shown that they have enough theological dexterity to survive the regular challenges to doctrine and belief that emerge from humankind’s increasingly sophisticated knowledge about the natural world (e.g., despite its very public spat with Galileo, the Roman Catholic Church has adapted to the scientific knowledge that the Earth orbits the Sun).” According to Weintraub, with the exception of a few fundamentalist sects, the Big Three religions “are robust enough to accommodate the paradigm-busting news that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would present.” Beyond those, a number of Eastern religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism, already explicitly posit other worlds and sentient beings.

When I asked Adam Frank (who, I should emphasize, is skeptical about UFOs) how he’d explain Buddhism to an alien, he offered a succinct response: “I would say that Buddhism is just this. It’s a religion that focuses on exactly what’s happening: nothing more.” I suspect believers and nonbelievers alike would do well to go with the Buddhists on this one and regularly take measure of a universe that’s at once perplexing and comprehensible. Something’s happening—in the skies, in our souls, or both, or neither, depending on whom you ask—and everyone’s this deserves a fair hearing

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10...on-clergy.html