We’ve conquered all the continents
With missionary zeal
Convincing unwashed heathens that
Our fantasy was real
When they die, they’ll go to heaven
When they would have gone to hell
Now it’s time to go converting
Through the universe as well
We’ve crossed deserts, plains, and oceans
We’ve seen villages galore;
We’ve gone door-to-door in cities
Till our praying hands were sore
We have witnessed to humanity
Each creed and every race
If we’re going to keep expanding
Then we gotta look to space
So we’re looking to the galaxy
For other living things
So that we can share the gospel
Of an earthly king of kings
So we’re gonna build some spaceships
And we’re gonna do our worst
But we’ve got to get a move on…
Lest the Mormons get there first!
Via “the mainstream media’s lonely UFO web log“:
With some 5,000 extrasolar planets either verified or pending confirmation and astronomers in hot pursuit of Earth-like worlds, religion isn’t waiting to for the shakedown to join the debate about its role. Although Vatican officials have stated their intention to welcome space “brothers” into the fold, there’s no such thing on the Third Stone From the Sun as collective aspirations. We got a preview last month, when Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., charged the search for ET life “is really driven by man’s rebellion against God in a desperate attempt to supposedly prove evolution.” There was no wiggle room in Ham’s screed. “I’m shocked,” he stated, “at the countless hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent over the years in the desperate and fruitless search for extraterrestrial life.”
Seems there is quite a spectrum of religious views of aliens (more at the link), but frankly I suspect that a religious view of aliens is about as useful as my dog’s view of aliens.
It will be very interesting to see how religion does — and does not — adapt to the irrefutable discovery of extraterrestrial life.
Almost marginally on topic – a couple of Mormon missionaries bicycled up to by sidewalk yesterday evening, and we talked briefly.
But they were female. That doesn’t seem very Mormony to me…..perhaps they are modernizing again!
I vaguely remember a nasty little SF story with interstellar missionaries. The missionaries weren’t human, and their cult held that there was just One Correct Shape. Since we didn’t have Correct Shape, they started surgically altering humans to the best viable approximation. Their first attempts didn’t survive, because the aliens were oviparous and had exoskeletons.
I suspect that even if the alien missionaries were very humanoid, we would wind up fighting for out lives against a technologically superior opponent that knew that it was Doing God’s Work.
>”lest the Mormons get there first.”
Ha, that got the LOL from me.
I am eager to see if we can find any life and, of course, intelligent life would be a bonus but as I get older year after year it seems less and less likely that I’ll be around.
The last ‘aliens’ is clearly objective; the first ‘aliens’ is clarified as objective by the parenthetical; the middle ‘aliens’ is really ambiguous in that it works as either objective or genitive. Genitive interpretation would be, a la stever says #3, scary, especially if their religious views are anything like ours. But not to worry as long as we don’t advertise what we’re like or where we are.
@stever #3 – One of my currently shelved writing projects involved alien religious fanatics. They moved out into interstellar space and found no intelligent life; clearly, their Creator had formed the universe just for them. Then they found a planet with unmistakably intelligent life. In a fit of fundamentalist pique, they created Von Neumann machines that would travel to other star systems and create 8 copies to send to other stars. The first probe would sit and watch the system for signs of intelligence: if even the slightest hint was found, the watcher would replicate in the millions and “bring the Truth” to the heretical planet.
The species that started this chain mysteriously vanished soon after the first probes were launched, in an event very similar to Earth’s Permian–Triassic extinction, oddly enough.
So… You have a dog. My race will find this information very useful indeed! Muahahahaha!
Anyways…when it comes to aliens with deadly zealous religious convictions, look no further than the hitchhiker’s guide’s planet of Krikkit. Ok maybe it’s not so much religion as rather “they exist. Kill them!”. Tomato potato.
“Seems there is quite a spectrum of religious views of aliens (more at the link), but frankly I suspect that a religious view of aliens is about as useful as my dog’s view of aliens.”
Your dogs view of aliens is actually more useful:
“If you can’t eat them or fuck them, piss on them.,”
Thanks for the inspiration, Cuttlefish. Or should I thank K Ham.
There have been some classic SF stories about that, e.g. The Streets of Ashkelon.