It’s become a regular godless ritual to scan the search results for “God” every Sunday morning. Hey, being an FTB minion has its perks and its tedium. Most of the articles are written by clergy with a message for believers the author feels will help them in their daily struggles, mixed in with the now unavoidable ideological nonsense masked as religion. But this one caught my eye: More Brits believe in aliens than in God:
CP World — The survey, for which the “XCOM: Enemy Unknown” videogame hired market research agency Opinion Matters to conduct, suggests that 52 percent of U.K. adults believe UFO evidence has been covered up because widespread knowledge of their existence would threaten government stability, as opposed to 44 percent who say they believe in God.
Around 10 percent of the country also claims to have seen a UFO, with almost a quarter more men claiming to have done so than women, the survey indicated. It also suggested that about 20 percent of the country believes UFOs have landed, while over 5 million U.K. residents believe the Moon landings were faked.
It’s definitely a mixed bag for the reality based community. And I’m not sure what people think of when they’re asked about aliens. Sexually obsessed greys hiding out in Area 51? Somewhere in the Cosmos there are likely intelligent entities outside of humans? The latter seems a lead pipe cinch statistically but no one knows; the truth is out there …
You can’t talk about aliens and religion for long with a godbot before s/he starts making shitty comparisons to your understanding of statistics and cosmology and their desperate need to validate irrational beliefs in ancient superstition. All I can say is I’d bet there are other intelligent creatures in this universe, it won’t destroy my faith if we don’t find them or injure my psyche should they prove not to exist. And I won’t be voting in any elections or telling other people what they should or should not be allowed to do based on what some guy on TV or in a pulpit claims the aliens want. … We all know aliens are dead set against taxing Job Creators …
If these are both ‘beliefs,’ they hardly reside on the same rung of the social or psychological ladder.
I’ve seen this survey referred to in several places, but no-one seems to have a link to the actual questions and results. I want to see those before making any judgement about what it means. I suspect it simply doesn’t show what is claimed.
I don’t know anything about this particular survey, but there are a couple of possibilities. In some surveys I have seen, the life on other planets questions are vague enough to allow anyone who thinks the probability of bacterial type extraterrestrial life is relatively high to answer ‘yes’. These answers are then added into the belief in UFO category. It is also definitte that a reasonably large number of people do believe that we have been visited. That the number is higher than those who profess some belief in god, I highly doubt.
We know that living things can exist on planets because we are living beings on a planet so that is hardly a weird idea.
Haven’t seen any god yet.
Hmm yeah a survey carried out on behalf of a company selling a game about an alien invasion and it returns a result that supports the effort to market the game… I might treat this one as suspect.
That said, xcom is awesome (if a trifle buggy)
Except that aliens do exist, and of course they’re here on earth. I saw a Swedish one just today.
I’ve always found it much more sensible to assume that there are discrete bits of life inhabiting widely separated niches throughout the universe than to assume (or naively accept) that there is a singular life form inhabiting all niches everywhere simultaneously.
Always. No kidding.
If nothing else, the overhead of being everywhere at once and being aware of everything at once just has to be crushing. Brutally, crushingly, prohibitively crushing.