What will happen to Christianity when we finally confirm ET?

a reply to: AinElohim

a reply to: Lucid Lunacy


Peace or Game On?

I appreciate that guitarist you posted, but I am telling you bro...

My music will destroy you!

This mind is tired of War

originally posted by: Prezbo369
Aliens would laugh their asses off once they hear about the different religions and the things they believe (assuming they laugh and have asses).

After that they'd slowly back away away, get in their their spacecraft and gtfo.

I'm pretty sure the existence of television is the sole reason we haven't been openly contacted.

Shhhhhhh.

Maybe if we're all really quiet AinElohim will go away.

a reply to: Eunuchorn

I need a friend like Lucid...

We'll see how it goes, but I'd really like to grab onto his coattail so I can infuziate my brain capacity to a higher level.

You gotta hang around elitist to get that kinda skill upgrade.

Here is an example of viewing them through a religious lens. Extra terrestrial entities should be wary of our religions.


And some humor:

a reply to: Akragon

Strictly by definition ET's are coming, have been here, and have already walked on this planet.
Angels, Demons, Satan, Jesus Christ, even God himself is an ET.
They exist in a spiritual dimension that biological humans can never enter, they can enter our dimension but we can't enter theirs.

But my question to you is what are you going to do when the ET named Jesus Christ is leading his myriads of ET angels to fix our planet as described in the book of Revelation ?

Let's make a new thread.....
"What are Atheists going to do when God and Jesus Christ are proved by world events to be real" ?

Actually the question is rhetorical, I already know the answer, they will do what Job's wife asked him to do when he was under Satan's tests......
(oh if you don't know you can always read the account)

a reply to: Blue_Jay33

I've been waiting for the perfect segue:

originally posted by: Anyafaj

originally posted by: Akragon

originally posted by: coldkidc
I've always wondered why people say this...

What exactly makes Christianity exclusive to a non-alien existence and why would the existence of aliens invalidate Christian beliefs?

Technically it invalidates Judaic beliefs, but Christianity holds to the same book...

Which I've already explained in the OP... Life started here according to the bible

Now see I'm Christian, but I'm also a thinker. The Book was written by man. Man is infallible. They can leave things out they don't agree with, and add things. Plus think of all the tons of translations that Book has gone through, what has been left out by accident in translation? I ask these questions of priests in the past and have gotten kicked out of churches for it. Apparently you are not allowed to be Christian and think for yourself.

You cannot be Christian, and think that the book you follow has led to anything valid.

How can you not see just how incredibly lost and sad that really is.

CHRISTIANITY, is even WORSE than the Bible, it does not even follow the meanderings within very closely at all!!

Not sure why you would be CHRISTIAN and think for yourself, are you one of the NEW NEW NEW ones who are constantly making it up as they go and actually convincing themselves the core tenets you do not even see can be questioned ??

Being CHRISTIAN, means you are NOT openminded.

You cannot be something that does not even really exist lol!

a reply to: Blue_Jay33

But my question to you is what are you going to do when the ET named Jesus Christ is leading his myriads of ET angels to fix our planet as described in the book of Revelation ?

For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.



good idea Btw!!

www.abovetopsecret.com...

originally posted by: Akragon
a reply to: Blue_Jay33

But my question to you is what are you going to do when the ET named Jesus Christ is leading his myriads of ET angels to fix our planet as described in the book of Revelation ?

For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.

good idea Btw!!

That's like the ultimate fail safe. No wonder it's infallible.

a reply to: Blue_Jay33

Jesus Christ is leading his myriads of ET angels to fix our planet as described in the book of Revelation ?

You mean the planet that was devastated by the whole 7 trumpets and 7 bowls thing? That devastation of course brought to us by angels under Yahweh's wrath.

Revelation 16:1-8 NIV
1 Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, "Go, pour out the seven bowls of God's wrath on the earth." 2 The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly and painful sores broke out on the people who had the mark of the beast and worshiped his image. 3 The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead man, and every living thing in the sea died. 4 The third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and springs of water, and they became blood. 5 Then I heard the angel in charge of the waters say: "You are just in these judgments, you who are and who were, the Holy One, because you have so judged; 6 for they have shed the blood of your saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink as they deserve." 7 And I heard the altar respond: "Yes, Lord God Almighty, true and just are your judgments." 8 The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and the sun was given power to scorch people with fire.

So let me get this straight Blue_Jay33 lol God's wrath destroys all sea life! Spreads a world-wide pestilence! Contaminates our fresh water supply! Causes the Sun to scorch the surface of our planet!

But hey it's all good. He later sends Jesus and some angels to "fix the planet"...

*Jim Carrey voice* Alriiiiighty then.

"What are Atheists going to do when God and Jesus Christ are proved by world events to be real" ?

Believe in their existence...

It's the wholly lacking evidence that causes us to disbelieve to begin with.

If by 'world events' you mean normal Earthly catastrophes with no evidence of divine origin... then no.

a reply to: Eunuchorn

His sheep know their shepherds voice...

a reply to: Anyafaj
That definitely Sound like a description of an ANDROID to me.
Read that a few times and think about it.
Just my thoughts.

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
a reply to: Akragon

Strictly by definition ET's are coming, have been here, and have already walked on this planet.
Angels, Demons, Satan, Jesus Christ, even God himself is an ET.

Well simple deductive logic; that would mean we are aliens!

originally posted by: Blue_Jay33
But my question to you is what are you going to do when the ET named Jesus Christ is leading his myriads of ET angels to fix our planet as described in the book of Revelation ?

Look man... Jesus is a super-Scientist that's like an elite scientist with mystical abilities and all that jazz.

Jesus being an alien is going to return to erath and destroy it utterly, then he's going to use his super duper science to resurrect the dna of the faithful into blank slate clones.

You need Jesus in your DNA I'm telling you if you want to be immortal?

originally posted by: Akragon
Extra terrestrial life is not compatible with Christianity...

The belief that all life in the universe started here is fundamental to Christian belief structure...

Adam was the first man, created by God from dust... but before that...

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Life was created on the third day with the emergence of plants... except

More then likely, Life was in other places in the universe far before it was here...

So what happens to the belief structure when we finally meet and confirm the existence of intelligent life beyond this little blue rock?

Obviously its only a matter of time before we know for sure...

Will Christianity conform to reality?

Or

Will they consider them "devils" which I've heard so many times?

I wonder...

Another one confusing Christian fundamentalists and Christians in general.

As a matter of fact, the Church has been looking for alien life for quite some time.

A Christian monk discovered genetics. A Christian priest theorized the Big Bang expansion. The Church already accepted the theory of Evolution and explained genesis is an allegory.


Looks like to me you are not informed about the current position of the Church and Christians regarding the Bible and the universe. That's a common trend on this board. Thinking Christians are all crazy and stupid and literally believing the earth is 6000 years old. The reality is that only American Christian fundies do.

Looking for GOD and ALIENS

Father Coyne, a scientist and Jesuit priest, contemplates God, telescopes, mirrors, and extraterrestrial life.

by Margaret Wertheim

For close to a quarter century, Father George Coyne has been director and senior scientist at the Vatican Observatory Research Group, a small but intensive unit of cosmologists and astronomers funded by the Holy See. A wiry and energetic man who entered into Jesuit training at the age of eighteen, Coyne is the son of a working-class family from Baltimore and is still slightly dazzled to find himself at the epicenter of Catholic life. In looking to the stars, Coyne sees his life as a natural outgrowth of what Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuit's founder, famously called "our way of proceeding." Ignatius stressed that a central aspect of Jesuit life was the concept of "ministry," or service to the wider community. For the original Jesuits of the sixteenth century that meant tending the poor and the sick; for Coyne and his Vatican colleagues, their ministry is astronomy.

The Vatican Observatory Research Group (VORG) is officially headquartered at Castel Gandolfo, a fortified castle perched on the rim of an extinct volcano an hour outside Rome. Formerly owned by the Medici, the castle now serves as the Pope's summer palace and the VORG's spiritual home. Last summer, I made the trip to Coyne's second home, in Tucson, Arizona. There, light years away from Roman opulence, the VORG conducts its research from a small suite of offices at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory. Rome and Tuscon, Catholicism and cosmology-Coyne moves effortlessly between the two worlds, insisting that "nothing we learn about the universe through science threatens our faith. It only enriches it."

In the mid 1960s, Coyne was part of a team studying the surface chemistry of the moon, part of NASA's preparatory work for the Apollo missions. Later, his research shifted to the formation of stars and the evolution of proto-planetary discs around stars, a major topic now in astrobiology, as it is assumed that planets are the first requirement for any form of life. Throughout his astronomical career, Coyne's work has inadvertently dovetailed with our growing desire for extraterrestrial contact, a subject about which he remains optimistically equivocal.

Today, the Vatican group is undertaking a detailed survey of all the galaxies in the neighborhood of our own Milky Way, what Coyne calls our "cosmic backyard." In the mid 1980s, the VORG decided to build its own telescope, a step that propelled this religious group to the very forefront of optical research and helped to usher in an astronomical revolution.

The Biggest Mirror on Earth

To understand what this revolution means, Coyne took me to visit Roger Angel at the University of Arizona's Mirror Lab, a legendary haven of optical innovation where the world's most powerful telescope mirrors are made. When the lab was getting started, Angel needed a test case to try out his technology and he teamed up with the VORG, whose advanced technology telescope, now boasts the first ever "spun cast" mirror.

In a bizarre partnering of science and sport, the Mirror Lab is bolted to the side of the university's football stadium. That's the one building on campus strong enough to support the huge machinery that casting requires. As we buzz for entry, Coyne talks about his love of athletics: At his next birthday he will turn seventy-one, yet he still gets up at 5 a.m. every morning to ride his bike for twelve miles and run for three.

Inside the lab, the main workroom stretches three stories high and is half the size of a football field. Gigantic gantries crisscross the space while several enormous cranes stand by awaiting orders-they can lift twenty tons, yet are eggshell sensitive. "It's a huge technical challenge," says Coyne, "you can't afford to scratch anything." The whole building is low-pressurized to protect the workspace from dust. Fifty yards away, at the far end of the lab, a newly minted mirror is being polished. At 8.4 meters in diameter, it seems impossibly big and at the same time indescribably delicate. With its deep concave surface, glistening smooth and bathed in water to aid the buffing, it resembles a miniature lake or, perhaps more aptly, a vast contact lens.

Telescope mirrors are indeed augmented eyes extending our vision to the far reaches of reality. This one has twelve times the light-gathering surface of the Hubble and is one of a pair intended for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), which will soon be world's most powerful optical instrument. One of the missions of the LBT, Angel tells me, will be to take pictures of extrasolar planets. "Before, you could only speculate about extraterrestrial life. Now we're at a point where we can make telescopes with which we can actually go looking for life." In order to maximize the mirror's resolving power, no bump on its surface is allowed to be larger than 100 nanometers. If this mirror were expanded to the size of North America, there would be no protrusion higher than four inches! The custom-designed robotic polisher crawling over its surface chips away just atoms at a time and constantly adjusts the shape of its foot to maintain perfectly contoured contact with the surface. Unlike conventional telescope mirrors whose surfaces are spherical, the ones made in Angel's lab are parabolic, the most efficient shape for focusing light.

Coyne and I are watching from a landing as the polisher inches its way over the surface and I wonder, frankly, how anyone tells the difference-it looks pretty near spherical to me. The distinction might sound minor, but Coyne tells me that polishing a parabolic surface is a major technical hurdle that Angel's team had to resolve. As an unusually deep parabola, the VATT's mirror represented an especially challenging case and much of the technology used here was developed on its surface.

Inside a High-Tech Igloo

Angel's most important innovation, however, is spin casting, a technology whereby the shape of the mirror is created while the glass is molten. The idea of a liquid parabola was first suggested by the great seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler: Spin a bowl of liquid and the force of gravity will naturally sculpt its surface into a parabolic depression. A few telescopes have actually employed this idea using rotating bowls of mercury, but that's a toxic way to view the stars. Angel realized that Kepler's insight could be implemented with molten glass-you'd just have to keep the whole apparatus spinning while the glass cooled and set.

Coyne and I climb up to a platform on the second floor of the lab so we can see down into the section where the casting takes place. We have come at a rare moment, for a brand new mirror has just been taken out of the oven and is sitting on its pallet like a gigantic lozenge. Most of its bulk is a honeycomb structure; there's just a thin layer of glass on top which will be polished to form the actual mirror surface. Angel explains that "the honeycombing gives the mirror strength but radically reduces the weight." Still, we're talking twenty-one tons of ultra-pure borosilicate glass, which must be specially shipped in from Japan.

The oven itself is one of a kind. A gargantuan Rube Goldbergesque contraption bristling with bolts and snaking tubes, it is ten meters in diameter and two and a half meters high. This apparatus rests on a base three and a half meters high that spins the entire construction seven times a minute. In flight it looks as if it might take you to the moon. On its floor is a layer of aluminum plating sitting on a bed of steel ball bearings, which allows the mold to expand and contract as the glass heats and cools. Without this precaution, thermal expansion would tear the mirror apart.

God's Sperm

Even turned off, the oven radiates power and Father Coyne and I approach it slowly, as if creeping up on a sleeping tiger. I'm not sure what I expected, but when we finally get inside we find ourselves standing in a strange high-tech igloo. The whole thing is lined with ceramic panels, each embedded with heating coils that press out in relief against the chalky background. I am reminded of fossilized worms embedded in shale. Father Coyne has never been in the oven before and he's clearly amazed, poking at the panels and marveling at the heat they produce. When they're cooking, the temperature reaches 2120 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt rock.

At peak power the coils draw 1.5 megawatts, enough to power a small suburb. Angel tells the story that when the VORG's mirror was cast, the original oven was spinning away wildly when suddenly he noticed it slowing down. Someone had kicked out the extension cord. "Things were a lot more relaxed back then," he observes dryly. These days the lab has two separate connections to the Tucson grid, plus two backup generators. Loss of power now would cost several million dollars in wrecked materials.

That original casting produced a 1.8 meter mirror, small by today's standards. But as Angel notes, a mirror is just the first part of the equation. "It was absolutely critical for us to see that the mirror could be turned into a telescope that would actually produce good images. And the Vatican group did that." To this day, the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope remains the best two-meter imagining scope on the planet, the perfect instrument for near-field astronomy. Its descendants, such as the Large Binocular Telescope, will be focusing on far fainter and more distant objects that may at last be able to image extrasolar planets. In a lovely twist of fate, the Roman Catholic Church has paved the way for instruments that may finally enable us to detect life on other worlds.

But should we expect to find life elsewhere? One afternoon as Father Coyne and I stroll among the telescopes at the Mount Kitt Peak facility just outside of Tucson, I asked Coyne if he believes there will be other populated worlds. As a priest who has been watching the stars for nigh on fifty years, he's likely given the question a good deal of thought. All the more reason why his answer startles me. Looking out at the telescopes arrayed around us, Coyne suggests that we might view stars as God's sperm. Every sperm has the potential to produce life, he says, but most of them never realize that goal. Like sperm, "each star is fired with a propensity for life, but there is no reason to think any of them have achieved this." Perhaps out there it is really nothing but vast clouds of gas and billions upon billions of nuclear fireballs going through the motions of physics and chemistry without ever reaching a biological threshold.

Then again, perhaps that threshold has been reached and somewhere in the infinite void of cosmological space there is another sentient being looking out for us. Whether or not we have intergalactic siblings, Father Coyne is confident that we are not alone-as a priest and as a scientist the marvel for him is the universe itself.

It does make sense for Christians to be looking for ET life, after all the God featured in the bible did't originate here on earth from what I can tell, making it an ET.

originally posted by: Prezbo369
It does make sense for Christians to be looking for ET life, after all the God featured in the bible did't originate here on earth from what I can tell, making it an ET.

God isn't a physical being

It's closer to an abstract concept. That's probably why a lot of people have a hard time understanding what is meant when people talk about god.

a reply to: Develo

The Church already accepted the theory of Evolution and explained genesis is an allegory.

Looks like to me you are not informed about the current position of the Church and Christians regarding the Bible and the universe.

Ironically I would say the same of you. What does 'The Church' mean?? Your post seems to be suggesting 'The Church' is the Catholic Church. Yet Catholicism doesn't speak for all Christians. In fact they only make up about half of Christendom.




Then factor in all the denominations. Which according to Wiki is 40,000+

So your suggestion that Christians view Genesis allegorically or that Christians welcome aliens and actively search for it... is off mark. Hell it's demonstrably false by looking at ATS alone! Plenty of Christians throughout ATS's history have claimed Genesis to be a literal account and not allegorical in nature....