Originally posted by HankMcCoy
I don't think ET is coming. I think its just fabrication and wishful thinking.
Well, that's fine Hank. So perhaps then we need TWO versions of your "religion" (though, for some strange reason, I'm still a bit uncomfortable with that tenet).
If the one group you seem to take some delight in chastising can be coined (by you) as "Extraterrestrialists", then what do we call the camp you fall into? The "Anti-Extraterrestrialists"? The "Ludicrousarians"? "The Way-of-the-NO-WAY"?
I mean, really, I have a lot of respect for your postings over the years, Hank. I'm just having a little trouble trying to ascertain your motivation here. Actually, I'm a bit surprised. I always took you to be one that more or less straddled the fence. Like many of us, I thought you were more of an...
AGNOSTIC. An agnostic -of any religious flavor- simply says that we DO NOT YET KNOW. We just don't have the irrefutable first-hand empirical evidence to prove existence.
Sure, many claim to have "seen" or "heard" or "witnessed", a la Greer's pals and that ilk. But that's not proof.
Many here and elsewhere have posted the ubiquitous fuzzy, dancing lights in the night sky YouBoob videos. Interesting. But not proof.
Abductions, autopsies, alien encounters, memes, hoaxes, non-hoaxes, radar, sonar, blah, blah, blah. Thousands of such incidents have been reviewed by many of us - you included, I suspect. But alas - none of it is proof-enough.
Neither skeptics nor religiously-inclined zealots are we, Hank. We simply do not yet have enough indisputable and verifiable evidence (operative words there) to state, unequivocally that ET exists. We are, as yet, ET-Agnostics.
We're getting there, however. NASA et al has increased tremendously their Astrobiology research funding. Water on the moon, tiny terrestrial-like planets orbiting distance solar systems, exobiological extreme environments - these are all bona fide research interests (some of which I am involved in) that seek to find that elusive holy grail of the cosmos: ET.
Not the ET of Hollywood or e.g., Boylan's "StarPeople", or Greer's teletransporter Disneyesque fantasies. No sir. The real deal. They're out there. Increasingly astronomers, cosmologists, and other thinkers and professionals the world over are convinced that the odds are overwhelming and discovery of life outside Earth (extraterrestrial life) is imminent.
That doesn't make us some kind of religiously-driven "Extraterrestrialists" or whatever label you wish to place on our backs, Hank.
We're patient, we'll just keep doing the research, following the Scientific Method, until we can share, among our peers and fellow humanists, that we are no longer, in fact, alone. We're not there yet, but (if I were in a gambling mood) my educated guess is that we will be soon - within a decade at least.
Some argue that we are already visited, have been for many years, centuries perhaps - the truth is merely being denied us by TPTB, secret government agencies, the illuminati, NWO, and/or religious fanatics (how ironic would THAT be, eh Hank)?
However, if that is true, and it maybe it is, then it does not further our cause for the truth because the truth is being denied us. Again, thus we must maintain the ET-agnostic posture: truth denied or truth undisclosed is, sadly once again, not proof. It is not truth if it is not true for all inquirers. A privileged few may know (or not), but until they share that truth it is theirs alone (and they know it).
So, Hank et al, do not lump me (and many others it seems) into a bucket of Extraterrestrialists or what-have-you. Not yet. Nor are we die-hard skeptics. We are neither - and will remain so until the FACTS, as they may be ascertained, are discovered, tested, repeatedly confirmed, and made public.
At that point, we still will not be Extraterrestrue-alists, Hank. We'll merely continue our work, our hunger for knowledge and discovery, our own brand of scientific "enlightenment" if you will.
Of one thing I can assure you: When the initial ET-discovery is made (my guess it will be a simple microbe on a moon or comet, etc.) our collective outlook on life itself, and many institutions of religion of all kinds around the world (even pseudo-religions like yours, Hank) will be scrambling to change, to adapt, to reconcile -as they must- to survive.
Until that day, Hank, I bid you well. And all others that struggle to understand, label, identify their thoughts. It's healthy. It's constructive. It's to the same end - and it serves us in good stead.
Thanks for the thread!
Carry on...
In the meantime (my signature), as always...
[edit on 11/16/2009 by Outrageo]
