People have Faith in Aliens/UFO's why not God?

Yup, same as everything is. But that's a pretty pointless road to head down don't you think?

Originally posted by TheStev
But they're still just claims made by people. As I say, what about the hundreds of people every year (if not more) who claim to have a divine experience or claim that God has spoken to them?

Can you supply me a link to one of those people and also to a link of a researcher's report on that person's sighting?

And how many of the witnesses that you refer to have you personally interviewed in order to verify their claims? So really, you're hinging your beliefs on hearsay.

No, I read the reports about them that have been investigated by experienced researchers. That's why researchers produce reference reports to record the experience for further verification. I don't NEED to interview everyone who had an experience when I can trust a researcher to conduct the investigation.

And interviewing those who have experienced UFO encounters will never verify the legitimacy of their claims - it can only verify whether or not they truly believe what they claim happened to them. Whether it happened or not cannot be verified by witnesses, no matter how much you interview them.

However, there are many verified, researched reports of witnesses that also have physical evidence (ground markings, burns, etc) to support their sighting. The case for UFOs does not only rely on flimsy eyewitness testimony - like most people think.

Originally posted by TheStev
Yup, same as everything is. But that's a pretty pointless road to head down don't you think?

Indeed, so why did you?

Unfortunately, I can't. I'll see if I can find some, but I'm sure most of them come from religious people, and I try to avoid religious rhetoric as much as possible.

Well if they come from deeply religious people, then their beliefs are already set and their claims can't be trusted - right? I'm sure a lot of the UFO reports come from people who already believed in UFOs, so let's stop that one right there.

So you trust these researchers that you've never met? Wouldn't that require a certain degree of faith on your part? After all, trust is simply faith in another person. If you've never met them, moreso the blind faith.

And as I said in an earlier post, proving UFOs exist is a no-brainer. You're proving that something exists which we are unable to identify. That's not really proving anything at all. Belief in UFOs is nothing next to belief that their occupants are alien visitors. Find me the ground markings and burns that corroborate that and we'll talk.

(Devil's advocate here - I believe in UFOs, Aliens and God)

Indeed, so why did you?

I didn't . I was simply explaining a previous posters intentions which you had obviously misinterpreted - you took us down the 'perception' path.

[edit on 8-3-2007 by TheStev]

What I was saying is that you can create; through education, beliefs and reading your own perception of what God appears to be. But God always is.
Screw religion but you analyze and pick apart the universe to what avail.
If you believe in nothing than you are nothing.

Pick.

I think it's argumentative to pretend that just because someone sees evidence of God in the beauty of nature it means that they don't realise that science has explained how these things happen. Science doesn't explain the beauty in them. Science doesn't understand beauty.

No, you took us down that path with this. Do you understand now? If not don't worry about it.

Do you want to see God? Look up at the sky on clear starry night and behold its majesty in all its glory! See the infiniteness of time and space where there is no beginning and there is no end; it's simply there -- and so is God. Do do feel it? Do you feel that somehow you are part of this gloriousness -- this marvelous creation where even though you are not up there with the stars right now, you're still surrounded by it -- as if you are in a womb that's ready to give birth and once one processes this, one becomes aware of a knowingness that someday one will be shining like a star in an ocean of infinity. That infinity is God.

Originally posted by pompano

I think it's argumentative to pretend that just because someone sees evidence of God in the beauty of nature it means that they don't realise that science has explained how these things happen. Science doesn't explain the beauty in them. Science doesn't understand beauty.

No, you took us down that path with this. Do you understand now? If not don't worry about it.

Keep jiggling that line, I'll let the next fish bite.

Originally posted by Palasheea
Do you want to see God? Look up at the sky on clear starry night and behold its majesty in all its glory! See the infiniteness of time and space where there is no beginning and there is no end; it's simply there -- and so is God. Do do feel it? Do you feel that somehow you are part of this gloriousness -- this marvelous creation where even though you are not up there with the stars right now, you're still surrounded by it -- as if you are in a womb that's ready to give birth and once one processes this, one becomes aware of a knowingness that someday one will be shining like a star in an ocean of infinity. That infinity is God.

The human mind is very complex Palashea. In fact, one of the most complex devices on the planet.

Like many of the people on here, I feel that there is enough ample evidence for aliens / ufos whereas there's absolutely ZILCH for a god. I also think that religion is a psychological disorder, along the same lines as "talking to your imaginary friends". I'm more inclined to believe that we descended from aliens, given that we share the same common physical characteristics, namely eyes, nose, arms legs, humanoid features. If we want to look at where we came from ,then there's a boatload of evidence to show we came from aliens rather than the concoction of some phrase in the Bible.

I also am of the opinion that our history and true origins have been deliberately hidden from us, for whatever reason, therefore religion was created to fill the gap and brainwash the populus - the sheep. Control the population like cattle. I think what is happening, is a mass awakening. Today, at work, we had a conversation about this very subject. People were actually coming out and saying that they would believe in aliens from outer space before believing in any gods. This is really happening. People are waking up. Finally. Even the Raelians may be onto the right track with regards to where we came from. Wouldn't be surprised if the truth was we really were a hothouse of cloned 'species', like a series of exotic experiments on planet Earth. Wouldn't be surprised if we have been wiped out several times in our history via ancient nuclear warfare. Wouldn't be surprised if the Pyramids were built by aliens. I'd believe that anyday over a dude that could walk on water.

I personally believe there is a God or Gods or Goddesses, but I dont buy into the whole Jesus theory. In fact, the bible itself pretty much sickens me....with all its hate, killing, rape, incest, racism, degrading women. You can definately tell a bunch of white MEN wrote it.... Romans, concil of Nicea 325 AD. (I'm a White man btw) Like a previous entry, the bible is made up of stories from old...way before the bible was even written. Just Google all the gods and goddesses that came WAY before Elohim and Jesus and compare. Mithra, Buddha, Krishna, Osiris, Isis, Horus...as Cher says, the list goes on. All born of a Virgin, some were even named Mary, On Dec 25th I might add. Some raised the dead (Horus raised El-Azarus from the dead...sound familiar?) , performed miracles, most even died on a cross and some between 2 theives. Its just crazy how so many people buy into this religion. But my momma did it, and so did her momma....yeah, thats because if you go real far back they were made to do it or they would be killed. Good Christians! HERE COMES THE HATE MAIL. All I know is the world would definately be a better place without Christianity, Islam and Judaism. These 3 religions have caused more wars, death, and hatred then anything else. Well, maybe they will die out like all the older Religions did. Might take a new religion to take over though, and thats what I'm scared of most. I hope it gets better instead of worse. THE SECRET...that would be cool. OK, enough ranting. Night.

OH YEAH, I think its ok to believe in a God or whatever...AS LONG AS IT DOESNT HURT ANYONE.

[edit on 9-3-2007 by tator3]

Originally posted by TheStev
Unfortunately, I can't. I'll see if I can find some, but I'm sure most of them come from religious people, and I try to avoid religious rhetoric as much as possible.

So, you claim that hundreds of people see God each year, but you can't give me the link to ONE report that has been researched by ONE investigator. Ok... cool, that helps your claim exactly how?

Well if they come from deeply religious people, then their beliefs are already set and their claims can't be trusted - right? I'm sure a lot of the UFO reports come from people who already believed in UFOs, so let's stop that one right there.

No. Let's continue this one... I don't care if UFO reports come from UFO believers. Big deal, that's statistically likely. What is more profound is that there are many reports that come from NON-BELIEVERS. People who had never believed in UFOs have reported seeing them.

So you trust these researchers that you've never met? Wouldn't that require a certain degree of faith on your part? After all, trust is simply faith in another person. If you've never met them, moreso the blind faith.

Sure I trust the researchers. I trust them to ask the questions, record the answers, measure the ground markings, etc. I can read the reports and see what information was contained within. It is not possible for me to interview every UFO witness, so I can read the credible reports and make up my own mind as to how I react to the information contained within.

Trusting an experienced researcher is knowing that they can perform their duty to with an acceptable level of accuracy. There is no faith required on my part. Seriously, I don't have 'faith' in people. I trust their reliability.

You have no idea what blind faith is if you think that I use a portion of it to believe a report written by a researcher. Please, you need to re-think that statement.

And as I said in an earlier post, proving UFOs exist is a no-brainer. You're proving that something exists which we are unable to identify. That's not really proving anything at all. Belief in UFOs is nothing next to belief that their occupants are alien visitors. Find me the ground markings and burns that corroborate that and we'll talk.

Lonnie Zamora, Socorro, New Mexico. Reported seeing child like creatures react in a startled manner when they saw him. They got into their craft and took off - upwards. Left indentations from the landing struts in the ground that were measured and photographed. Is that enough for you, or do you dismiss what a police officer saw when he also has physical evidence to back up his sighting?

Google search as many abductee burn marks as you like and read them all. Will that be enough for you?

I wish that your fictional God would give you sheep some sliver of evidence to at least make the rest of us non-believers bother to be even mildly interested. A contradiction of course, something that doesn't exist can't leave evidence that it does.



Palasheea - seriously... when I look up at the sky at night I do not see God. I see empty space and star light. Sometimes a planet, comet, meteor, or even a satellite. I don't know how or why you want to impose some divine imagery upon that view.

I like your posting. It reminds me of how the Grey's try to convince man that they are the creators. Funny how they look like "serpents" and abductees always say that they small like sulfur. God told us this in the Bible to warn man about their existence. Satan and his fallen brothers were made to take on the form of the serpent. There are also the "lizard" race. These seem to me that they are the race of the fallen that have dominion over the lesser grey's. There is a chain of command in the world of the demonic, just as there is in the Kingdom. God warns man that in the last days there would be many lying signs and wonders to deceive man of thier true destiny with Christ. They are claiming that they ARE the creator, which is blasphemy. The grey's have also said that they created Christ in order to give man a figure of civility. They even say that they have influenced the writting of the Bible for this reason. They are taking credit for what God has done! They are the fallen one's. There are other beings that are beutiful and tell people that God is real and that they have a great divine destiny...the true messengers. We are always in "Bible times" until the Book ends, after the 1000 year reign. Then the Kingdom will exist everywhere. God bless and keep the faith. Not all of us are deceived.

Well, I don't see any particular decline in faith when it comes to God or Jesus as God's kid. And that's unfortunate as far as I'm concerned, because I think it's a lot of silly nonsense best suited for infants who don't know better.

But as it has been pointed out, aliens have a much better chance of exisiting that some vaguely defined supernatural entity in the sky responsible for creating, monitoring and guiding all activity in the Universe. If that's what we're talking about when you say "God," that is. Most people can't even define the bugger, which makes it even more surprising and illogical that they might actually believe in it.

We at least know we human beings (along with all the other various critters) managed to find a way to scratch out a living on this spinning hunk of rock in the cold depths of space, and considering that we know that the basic chemical building blocks we're made of are tossed all around the Universe, it's not too much of a stretch to think what happened on Earth might have happened elsewhere.

There's absolutely zero proof of life anywhere but here, of course, but given the starting circumstances, it becomes more a matter of guessing about the probabilities. If you think the probabilities are high, then you're less likely to think there are any aliens out there. If you think the probabilities are pretty good, then aliens might be thick as fleas out there, they just haven't been too good at showing themselves.

"God," on the other hand, pretty much either exists, or it doesn't, right? There's no way to rationally say that because such-and-such thing exists, that increases the probability that God also exists. There's either obvious, undeniable proof, or there isn't. It's not good enough for evidence to just "suggest" that there's a God. If it isn't completely and absolutely undeniable, unassailable and unimpeachable from the very beginning, then it's automatically worthless as proof.

Here's an analogy. See if you can follow along.

Suppose I have a box, and I tell you that it might have an apple in it. You go over and open the box and sure enough, it has an apple in it. Now I give you a hundred boxes, and tell you there might be apples in all of them, some of them, or none of them. In that situation, you can at least be led to think that because the hundred boxes are pretty much the same as the one with the apple in it, then there may be a chance that at least one of the other boxes has an apple in it. And if not in these hundred boxes, then there might be an apple in one of the next hundred boxes, or the next hundred billion billion. There are a lot of boxes, and if you come to think something inherent with the box has to do with there being an apple in it, then you can be relatively confident that somewhere out there, in one of those special, nearly-identical boxes, there's another apple. That's what "believing" in aliens is all about.

On the other hand, suppose I only have one box and one box only. I tell you that there might be an apple in the box, or there might not. But in this case, you're not allowed to look in the box. You can maybe pick it up and shake it, and you can hear something bumping around in there, and maybe you can say, "okay, there's an apple in there," even though it might be a rock or an orange or a pear. You don't know. In any event, even if it was a rock or pear, you'd still be wrong about thinking there was an apple in the box. So you might be tempted to attribute rock and pear-like qualities to your apple, so you can hedge your bet a little. But the bottom line is that until you open that box up and we all get a good look inside, and either see that apple or not, then it's pointless to simply "believe" there's an apple in it. Even if your best friend says they opened the box and sure enough saw a nice, big juicy apple in it, we can't know for absolutely sure until we're presented with that one piece of information that makes it either true or not. Oh, and remember that there are no other boxes. You only have to one. That's what believing in "God" is all about.

Now either way, people can be equally wrong about aliens and God. Maybe there are no other apples in all the billions upon billions of other boxes. The apple was just a weird, one-shot fluke. And maybe somebody could find a way to open that single box that might have God in it, and there's just nothing in that box, either. All the rattling turned out to be just wishful thinking.

So far, that's the score. Alien believers zero, God believers zero.

And it's up to each individual in their heart of hearts to decide if it's worth all the time and effort and expense and fighting and arguing and killing to get others to go along with your belief, or even to keep trying to find out what's in the damned box(es). People, smart little monkeys that we are, are generally both imaginative and curious, however, and it's impossible to stop them from trying.

Originally posted by ForceMaster
I like your posting. It reminds me of how the Grey's try to convince man that they are the creators. Funny how they look like "serpents" and abductees always say that they small like sulfur. God told us this in the Bible to warn man about their existence. Satan and his fallen brothers were made to take on the form of the serpent. There are also the "lizard" race. These seem to me that they are the race of the fallen that have dominion over the lesser grey's. There is a chain of command in the world of the demonic, just as there is in the Kingdom. God warns man that in the last days there would be many lying signs and wonders to deceive man of thier true destiny with Christ. They are claiming that they ARE the creator, which is blasphemy. The grey's have also said that they created Christ in order to give man a figure of civility. They even say that they have influenced the writting of the Bible for this reason. They are taking credit for what God has done! They are the fallen one's. There are other beings that are beutiful and tell people that God is real and that they have a great divine destiny...the true messengers. We are always in "Bible times" until the Book ends, after the 1000 year reign. Then the Kingdom will exist everywhere. God bless and keep the faith. Not all of us are deceived.

Please supply me a link to prove these claims, otherwise I can take it all as deranged ramblings from another brainwashed sheep.

To the OP:

I can't see any more evidence for the truth of Christian teachings than I can for the existence of alien life and UFO's. I spent most of my life living as a Christian. I am no longer, and can see this debate from both sides of the fence to some extent.

You are coming at this from a Christian perspective, so you cannot be completely unbiased or objective. To you, the bible is the word of your god and your faith the cornerstone of your religion. The "knowledge" (I have to insist that this is purely personal and subjective knowledge) these instill is evidence enough to fuel and maintain your absolute faith.

I have heard many Christians argue that their religion must be the right one because it says so in the bible. They use quotations and passages to "prove" that they are correct. Yet, for someone to question the absurdity of this argument is offensive. I'm not painting a picture of all Christians, but there are many out there like this in my personal experience. I used to be one.

I don't think it is *always* about faith in the belief in alien life or UFO's, so much as wishful thinking. Some people see circumstantial evidence that is convincing enough for them to make up their mind. Others are more objective and keep their mind open to the possibility, but their feet planted firmly on the ground.

The drop in numbers of faithful within Christianity is due to many reasons. Not least of which; its bloody history and because there doesn't seem to be any resolution to the continuing schisms and divisiveness between and amongst denominations.

This is just my own opinion based on what I have experienced and I make no claims to it being the absolute truth. I don't think there is an absolute truth. Flames on a postcard to.....

Grey

EDIT for clarification

[edit on 9/3/07 by Grey_Pilgrim]

Originally posted by SuicideVirus
Suppose I have a box, and I tell you that it might have an apple in it.

Didn't Adam get kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating the apple in Eve's box??? hahahaha! The naughty man caused all the sin in the world after that. I wonder if he at least swallowed the pips... Do any of you zealots know the answer?

i'll count myself out as i have faith in the reality of God and Aliens .

Originally posted by Gooey
In my opinion, whoever believes in religion is an idiot. I would bet my life 99% of christians in this country don't even know half of what the bible is about, what its origins are, what stories are behind it, and what is was made for. The bible is a fairy tale, while some of the stuff may have been adapted from older stories or folk lore, and some of it is basic history, there is no huge even like the coming 'Jesus' that is true. Call me crazy, call me a biggot, call me whatever you like. The fact is, I doubt almost everyone who is part of a faith doesn't know jack about it. Jesus for instance? Guess what? He didn't even freaking exist. There were no other documents EVER about him outside of the bible. Don't you think something like that would be written down elsewhere? Even if it was in somones 'journal'? Heres another thing. With each issuing of the bible, stories, quotes, events and people in it get slightly changed. If you compared a bible from 1000 A.D. with one today, it would be vastly different. I can easily see the bible having been made as a book of morals so to speak, and over time, when it fell into the hands of the ignorants, becoming an actual religion, and over time the book became more and more altered. Not to mention all of the inconsistancies. Sorry but its just a bunch of crap. The likeliness of some form of alien life being on the trillions and trillions of other planets around the galaxy is almost definite, the validity of a musty old book you have no idea where it came from is something I wouldn't rest my arm on.

This is exactly my stand.

IF, you posted your story of UFO on ATS full of holes and without
any kinde of proof - you knew the reaction!

So the difference is obvious.

what would be the point of creating mankind . well as it is write in the bible the creator knew from the beginning that the men would destroid itself (armagedon) or end of time... my point is if l put a couple of rats in my house and l wait a few years , l know for a fact that my house would have become a desaster place to live . since l know from the beginning the catastrophic ending result, l'm bright enough to not doing it... now if god already knew the end result what would be the point of creating us. as far as we can trace, the churh had done so many thing to keep us blind, they get mad every time that the scientis discovert prouf that does not fit whit what is write in the bible. remember ( lucie )the first préhistoric skelet found , the church didn't like it at all , they urge to tel the wourld that it was a malformation. they did not like it when the scientis told the wourld that the noe flood could not have being possible since the glacier where much olther than the noé story . mankind has created gods .