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InverseLookingGlass
I need help understanding religion. Believers are welcome here.
Here's the question:
If an advanced alien race just happened to contact a faithful individual (you) and offered a choice:
1. Allow you to "save" the world and all it's people with free energy and food.
2. Allow you (or someone that you choose) to identify the "unworthy" that would be removed from the planet Earth to a different habitable planet and then apply #1 to all the people remaining.
3. Aliens go back to where they came from without doing anything else.
Which would you choose and why?
2. Allow you (or someone that you choose) to identify the "unworthy" that would be removed from the planet Earth to a different habitable planet and then apply #1 to all the people remaining.
InverseLookingGlass
I need help understanding religion. Believers are welcome here.
Here's the question:
If an advanced alien race just happened to contact a faithful individual (you) and offered a choice:
1. Allow you to "save" the world and all it's people with free energy and food.
2. Allow you (or someone that you choose) to identify the "unworthy" that would be removed from the planet Earth to a different habitable planet and then apply #1 to all the people remaining.
3. Aliens go back to where they came from without doing anything else.
Which would you choose and why?
Wandering Scribe
reply to post by InverseLookingGlass
Tell it to go home without doing anything.
#1: you remove the process of labor from the equation. If human beings never have to earn their living, then they cannot fully appreciate anything they possess. Part of the value of a thing is determined by the effort we put into attaining. If you give us free energy and free food then all of our further advancements in science and agriculture become moot, and the efforts of millions of people across the globe become trivial and unimportant.
#2: how do you determine who is, or is not, worthy? If you picked a known religious figure, like, say, the Pope, then you can be sure that every atheist, Satanist, Hindu, Buddhist, and non-Catholic would be lined up for removal/execution. Likewise if you picked the Dalai Lama, then everybody who practices a Chinese folk-religion, or some other proponent of keeping Buddhists from attaining full human rights, would be discarded. If you picked a politician, then their inborn racism, sexism, ageism, and more would color their choices. Human beings are, inherently, segregationists. We all do it: you, me, the posters above and below me. All of us. So no one could actually pick and choose who deserves to live, or die.
Which leave us with #3: E.T. go home.
~ Wandering Scribe
Wandering Scribe
#1: you remove the process of labor from the equation. If human beings never have to earn their living, then they cannot fully appreciate anything they possess. Part of the value of a thing is determined by the effort we put into attaining. If you give us free energy and free food then all of our further advancements in science and agriculture become moot, and the efforts of millions of people across the globe become trivial and unimportant.
#2: how do you determine who is, or is not, worthy? If you picked a known religious figure, like, say, the Pope, then you can be sure that every atheist, Satanist, Hindu, Buddhist, and non-Catholic would be lined up for removal/execution. Likewise if you picked the Dalai Lama, then everybody who practices a Chinese folk-religion, or some other proponent of keeping Buddhists from attaining full human rights, would be discarded. If you picked a politician, then their inborn racism, sexism, ageism, and more would color their choices. Human beings are, inherently, segregationists. We all do it: you, me, the posters above and below me. All of us. So no one could actually pick and choose who deserves to live, or die.
Which leave us with #3: E.T. go home.