How would you describe your faith/religion to an alien?

  • Thread starter Thread starter John_the_Blind
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
J

John_the_Blind

Guest
As the title asks, assuming you were faced with an extraterrestrial- a bona fide Roswell/Area 51 type ALIEN- who had no idea what faith or religion is, how would you go about describing to him or her (or it) your faith and the religion you follow?

Note that this is not intended to spark a ‘proof versus no proof’ argument; I’m only asking how others would go about this sort of thing. I’m trying desperately to get my own thoughts and beliefs straight, so maybe I’ll pick up on ways of writing and explaining things that will help.
 
Last edited:
Well, first, they’d have to speak your language, or at least, be able to understand it.
 
Okay, assume they speak and understand english (or whatever language one speaks). 😃
 
Last edited:
Alien: Who is ‘God’? Where does he live? Do humans truly live forever? Why did his son have to die?
 
John_the_Blind said:
Alien: Who is ‘God’? Where does he live? Do humans truly live forever? Why did his son have to die?
Click to expand...
AB) The eternal creator of the universe who is entirely outside of it.
C) Yes, although we have to die and rise to new life first.
D) To show His love for us.
I should note that I would be desperately watching every statement the Magisterium makes for advice.
 
John_the_Blind said:
Alien: Who is ‘God’? Where does he live? Do humans truly live forever? Why did his son have to die?
Click to expand...
I like to answer a question with a question.

I would say to the alien
“who created you? What happens to you when you die?” and I’ll see what it says first before answering more questions. That will test what it is up to in terms of belief systems.

Coz its always hard to describe ice for someone who only lives in a hot desert. So I want to see what the alien’s concept of" belief" is.
 
Last edited:
I think if the alien is capable of communicating with us intelligently they are almost guaranteed to have some concept of spirituality or the idea of the supernatural, even if it might reject the idea. These things stem in part from the imagination’s ability to consider and contemplate different realities other than our immediate surroundings and to see meaning in existence, and any life that is cognitively able to create a complex civilization like humans is going to have this in their history, because the existence of any complex civilizations means that throughout their species’ history they would have needed to barter and negotiate and compromise and reflect and self-improve to eventually over the generations get to an advanced level of social, political, and technological development. They’re inevitability going to contemplate questions of life and death and value and morality along the way.

If a species can’t think abstractly about any of these things than they could never be capable of forming a civilization in the first place.
 
Last edited:
If the species hasn’t had any revelation from God, which seems unlikely, then their closest thing to religion would probably be some form of pantheism or transcendentalism similar to the Buddhist or Hindu religions. Christianity is extremely weird in that a teacher or philosopher, however ardent and pure their desire for truth might be, would never be able to sit down and come up with something as counter-intuitive and random-sounding as the Trinity. When humans are left to their own devices they can contemplate the supernatural but their thinking is nonetheless limited to their own abilities.
 
Last edited:
It would probably go sometihng like this…

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
  1. Avoid wrong actions.
  2. Follow good actions.
  3. Always be aware of the difference.
Buddhism in a nutshell.
 
Our species has offended our Father and Creator so greatly than He had to send us away from Heaven. But because He loves us He did not punish us all the way through but sent us on Earth so we can rise above the offense and pay for our sins and go back to Heaven. One of His angels disobeyed God and keeps on trying to trick us in going in conflict with God, because he is evil and hates us deeply. Because God saw us unable to do this without proof of His love for us and seeing many of us not remembering Him, He sent many prophets to His chosen people, the Jews, to advise us what to do, until one day He also sent His Son to us to bring us signs and fulfill a promise He made to us. Because His Son saw us unable to rise above the temptations coming from the fallen angel and we started doubting Him, it was decided He would completely show us the path on which to walk, together with Him, even all the way down to Hell (the place of punishment) and He will still love and help us rise back to Heaven, so He died for us as one of us. He rose back from death to show us even more signs. He founded a Church with a powerful ritual to help us rise above. We are awaiting His return when God will finally judge us. We hope we have done enough good deeds to change our hearts back, into the perfect hearts God gave us to be received back to Heaven.
 
Probably I would say to them, “Beep!” As a “hi” (just to make sure their gadget is on), and then I’d say, “My God create the whole universe, what does your God create ?”

Alien may say something like “Oh, we do not need god to create the universe. We create the universe”

At which I will say to them “Sorry, I dont believe you exist, because God did not created no aliens”

For the sake I win the argument, I will say them “and my believe is based on faith alone!”

🙂
 
Last edited:
If they have the technology that enables them to travel among the stars then they are probably something like the angels, from our perspective. They would know that the universe could not have happened by chance. Life cannot exist unless there is a very narrow margin of conditions that could not have occurred randomly. Creation needs a creator.
Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D. has done several talks on the subject.
Cosmic Origins - The Scientific Evidence for Creation | with Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D.

 
Last edited:
I would begin by saying, that there is one God, alone worthy of worship, without equal, opposite, partner, or offspring. The transcendant creator and immanent sustainer of the universe.
 
I would tell him to look at the world and develop your own coherent understanding with regards to the reason we are here.
 
In the beginning* was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.

What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

A man named John was sent from God. He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.

He was not the light, but came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him.

He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.

But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.

And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.

John testified to him and cried out, saying, “This was he of whom I said,l ‘The one who is coming after me ranks ahead of me because he existed before me.’”

From his fullness we have all received, grace in place of grace, because while the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God. The only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed him.
 
Are you asking because you want to invade Area 51 in september with the rest of the internet?
 
This prologue is one of the many reasons on why John’s Gospel is my favourite.
 
Last edited:
I’d start by asking if he has any ideas of his own origins or of the universe itself. If he knows where he came from besides a womb or some other means of reproduction, what he’s here for, if for anything, and where he’s going next if they die physically like we do.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top