WE SEE TWO MAJOR EXTREMES AMONG BELIEVERS IN ET'S
On one side, you have those who believe ETs are spiritually perfect and on the other side, those who believe ETs to be demons of Satan and vilest adversaries to God and Christ.
I see Christ bandied about again and again, his great message of love reduced to constant end-times, fire and brimstone. I’ve seen it all before, and I hope some others have seen it, and paid attention to that revelation.
I lived during the massive build up of both atomic and hydrogen bombs by America and Russia. I remember seeing 50-megaton test explosions aired ever so often on TV.
The Christian evangelical church was quick to attribute this to a direct sign of the “End Times” as prophesied in the Bible. End Times --the devastation, destruction-- was a topic of uncountable sermons, as many evangelical preachers spoke from the pulpit and intentionally fed the fear that, unless you got your house in order, we were all due for Jesus’ wrath. And, if found wanting, there was no chance of redemption.
The “near” future the Christian evangelicals predicted would go something like this: Russia and China would go to war against America…atomic weapons would be exchanged by both sides. Then Russia would go after the church because communism was The Anti-Christ, signified by their atheistic communism/socialism state.
These attacks on the church would herald the final battle of Armageddon. God would destroy Russia and China, representing communism and the most wicked governments of the world, and create a New Heaven and New Earth, which were God’s --meaning Jesus’-- Kingdom on earth.
New heaven, new earth
Oh! Almost forgot: everyone who wasn’t saved, according to the Christian evangelicals’ definition, would burn forever in hell as a last, loving tribute of God.
Unbelievers burning in hell, loving tribute of God
Some preachers and religious writers of that time were devoted to interpretation of these elaborate prophesies pointing to this period as the end. Many of the prophesies of Daniel and Revelation were touted as absolute evidence in support of this end times warning. Thousands of Christian believed beyond most doubt that this was “IT”, that this was what they said the Christian Bible has been interpreted to call a phenomenon or period called the rapture.
Now, even UFOs were not exempt from these end time prophesies. Since abductions were not widely known in the Fifties, UFOs in the sky were claimed by the Evangelicals as the “great sign of wonder in the sky” as foretold in the end time’s prophecies. The Aliens were once again demons, disguising themselves to confuse Christians and make them believe in evolution.
This great prediction fell flat on its face.
The ultimate nuclear exchange just didn’t happen because of…good old self preservation. You could count on the tyrants and powers of the world to be cowards and not willing to sacrifice their own lives for anything…even less willing to rule over a dead world underground, in a massive nuclear-hardened shelter. They weren’t looking forward to the limited pleasures and reduced options of that post-nuclear world. No, they always backed off.
In the end, it was so much easier to come up with less deadly Armageddon alternatives that didn’t include the leaders’ own deaths. Add to that reluctance to self-extinguish the governing class, the leaders of our nations found safer ways to fight… where other people do the dying…Strategic skirmishes. Limited engagements…
Of course all the wars were supported by the evangelicals in America because this was God’s country and Russia was the anti-Christ.
The real sadness here is the cry wolf response, experienced by those of us with brains. Christian evangelicals would decide when God’s time for End Times would occur…again and again. Some of these Christian groups should be ashamed of themselves.
Wolf in sheeps (church) clothing crying wolf
So there are those who say it was all for the good, that crying wolf --crying Armageddon-- has made us more aware of the cost of larger wars, nuclear war, world war.
But is this how Christians want to bring Jesus to the people, by identifying Jesus with the ultimate fear…as a world-killer?
Many of us believed the byproduct of all this fear was to fill churches with people and massive, tax-exempt donations, with very little account of what happened to the money.
I remember reading the sermons of Christ, and I never once picture him speaking to the assembled crowds of fear…not to mention damnation.
The people Jesus spoke to were the poor and the hopeless, the sick, and the tormented, which lived lives of fear and damnation daily anyway, just as hundreds of millions do today. The hopeless and the sick didn’t need to add Christian fear to their daily suffering. Jesus spoke to them about the need to change inside, he spoke of loving those that hurt you, and he said that we are all in a way, part of that hurt, as long as we allow so many people to exist with no hope, justice, or future.
The poor, hopeless, helpless and the sick
This is not what I hear today. A Christ of battle and death and eternal punishment, more than a Christ of love and justice is the version we hear today. But I have heard it before and historical accounts show it was used during the “Dust Bowl” era, too.
I believe many fundamentalist religions are, oddly, the most stringent proponents of “Human-Centric Thinking”. Fundamentalist human-centric thinking proclaims notions like The Whole Universe Revolves Around US! and Our world is one and only intelligent creation by God, for God!
The rest of the Universe was a showcase to us of the grandeur of his creation.
Today in the ufology domain, we have Christian Evangelicals scaring us with the assertion that ETs are demons and that they could not be from other planets. These anti-ET proponents tell us this is so, by focusing on abductions and the deaths of cows that ET couldn’t be less than evil beings under satanic control.
Alien - demon assertations
But I don’t see the ETs doing anything worse than our country has done and continues to do. I see many Christians supporting this country’s attitude in an array of horrible practices that we shouldn’t accept: torture, ongoing invasion of other countries, more. Does that make our nation and the Christians among us who choose to support our nation’s worst practices-- as evil as demons, too?
But what really is stating to end this ET as demons-of-the-end-times thinking is mounting new evidence pointing to a Universe teeming with planets and probably, life.
We’re only now seeing scientific papers that attempt to account for infinitely faster space travel faster than light. These are no longer fantasies. The worlds of our coming space travel are probably living worlds much older than ours, where entities have devised relatively easy ways to travel between worlds, perhaps, between galaxies. If these explorers from other worlds --the ETs-- are here and have been here, we can take great solace in the historic evidence that shows they have not interfered or tried to take over.
If it had been the other way around, if we, instead of ETs had been the long-distance travelers, do you think the record of our space travel --without war-making, without annihilation of nations and populations, without devastation of animal and plant life-- would be the same?
I don’t know about you, but I’m more frightened of the evangelicals and their scare tactics and their intrusive meddling in the government of America than the ETs.
- Joseph Capp
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