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Even More Jump on the Ancient Astronauts as Religion Bandwagon

10/27/2013

10 Comments

 
I’m sure you’re tired of hearing me talk about the connection between ancient astronauts and religious belief. However, I think it says something that many of the people who have been writing about ancient astronauts recently (as in the last day or two) are seeing the same things that I am, even if they don’t quite conceptualize it the same way that I do.

A blogger named Mohave Rat strongly disapproves of organized religion, particularly the three Abrahamic faiths, and also considers Ancient Aliens one of his favorite TV shows. He likes Ancient Aliens because it provides him with an extraterrestrial cudgel to hit back at the claims of religion. He particularly likes Zecharia Sitchin’s claim (which actually is an article of ancient Mesopotamian faith) that humans were created as slave race to serve the gods. This, he says, is a finger in the eye of organized religion and its special creation of humanity:

Of course, mankind is determined to be special no matter what. Just being an advanced primate well on our way is not enough. NO we got to be the "children of the most high" or some such nonsense. Maybe or maybe not.

Yet the ancient astronaut theory actually does what the blogger wishes it would not: It provides yet another way in which humans can imagine themselves as the special creation of heaven.

Meanwhile, over at a Christian website focusing on the literal truth of the Torah (sorry, but the fine gradations of which group of believers emphasizes which books of the Bible is a bit beyond me) the writer is excited about a two-hour documentary on the Nephilim which gives the true “Luciferean” origins of giants, ancient astronauts, the Anunnaki, and all the pagan gods. It seems like the kind of documentary that I ought to watch and comment on, but the thought of spending two hours listening to an explication of Christian demonology is daunting.

Finally, the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion produces a podcast called Research on Religion, and what do you think its topic for today is? Of course it’s ancient astronauts. The podcast is hosted by Tony Gill, a professor of political science at the University of Washington, who takes the position (though not uncritically) of an ancient astronaut advocate (which he claims to be me “mesmerized” by) in a discussion with Chris White of Ancient Aliens Debunked. For a professor of political science who wrote an entire book on the colonialist role of religion in Latin American countries, he seems remarkably unaware of the colonialist implications of the ancient astronaut theory, as the official summary makes clear:

Tony challenges Chris to explain how [Egypt’s] technologically backward society could build such monumental structures without the help of some futuristic technology. […] How could an ancient tribe build [Easter Island] statues these [sic] massive and why were they looking outward to the sea? 

The noble Greeks and Romans managed to build their buildings without assistance, and the medieval Christians raised massive—and much more technologically complex—Gothic cathedrals without even the help of a steam engine, yet somehow the very idea that non-Europeans could move, raise, or stack stones is reason enough to call down the gods from heaven to explain such “impossible” feats.

White and Gill are both wrong that ancient astronaut theorists simply fail to account for the “disappearance” of the aliens after the Middle Ages. As we’ve seen, on Ancient Aliens the extraterrestrials never left and in fact (a) helped found America, (b) rustled cattle in the Old West, (c) psychically uploaded relativity theory into Einstein’s brain, and (d) continue to anally probe humans as the denizens of UFOs.

Chris White tells Tony Gill that one of the reasons for the interest in ancient astronaut ideas is that they provide a scientific-seeming story to allow the believer to free him- or herself from traditional religion by turning faith into science. (White is himself a devout Christian who believes the Nephilim were real fallen angels who mated with human women.) I disagree and think that the opposite is true, that such beliefs help the believer to reconcile science and religion and find a “scientific” reason for believing in old mythology and the literal reality of ancient religious texts. In this it is the opposite of fundamentalist creationism, which seeks bend science to religion rather than the other way around.

Nevertheless, I found it interesting that three times in 24 hours people from such disparate viewpoints all recognized that the ancient astronaut theory is essentially a religious question, and that it speaks to questions of faith and an attempt to renegotiate humanity’s relationship to nature and to the divine.

10 Comments
Only Me
10/27/2013 06:30:10 am

Makes me wonder if Giorgio will deign to acknowledge this growing development, then try to shoehorn it into an upcoming episode. After all, it's okay to believe in ancient astronauts, right?

Reply
Shane Sullivan
10/27/2013 12:53:36 pm

That Baylor Institute podcast actually does touch on the "they never left, they just stopped building pyramids and started mutilating cattle" supposition.

By the way, to me, science and religion are easily reconciled: I use "God" as a lil' nickname for Hartle-Hawking state. I find this resolves any incompatibilities between Abrahamic religion, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Taoism, and rational thought, while solving the God/universe/chicken/egg paradox, even as it validates Buddhists' rejection of the very concept of an origin of the universe.

But that's just me. It's probably not as marketable as a bunch of made-up stories loosely based on the works of a pulp sci-fi author.

Reply
Gunn
10/27/2013 01:00:27 pm

We are so far advanced from apes that people can't accept that we evolved naturally.

We must have been created in some way, besides evolution, is what people are saying. The ancient astronaut theorists are saying this, that our evolution was deliberately tampered with, and most Christians are saying this, that we were created initially as fully-developed humans. Many people also believe conversely, that humans simply evolved, period.

Some things are not meant to be proven, but instead better understood later on. We cannot separate man's spirit from man's body. Only death can. There is more to mankind than DNA.

Why can the human body be considered a temple of God? Because the human body can be indwelled by spirits, whether one's own spirit, or demons, or God.

Are humans good in God's sight? No, which is why we need a Redeemer, an Intercessor, Someone who has paved the way for us...if only we will believe. People are striving to believe. Above all animal species, we seem to have a spirit, a part of us that lives on. We should not feel special in our own eyes, because we evolved or were otherwise created from the dust of the earth.

People want to consider the supernatural world, and accept it. But some of it is unacceptable, for there are also such realities as good and evil. We are told that supernatural battles are taking place in spiritual realms every day. The battles will culminate in a better world to come, without evil, and without the faithless...including those who give God no credit for His creation.

(Again, from the Amen Corner.)

Reply
Narmitaj
10/28/2013 02:41:40 am

"The ancient astronaut theorists are saying this, that our evolution was deliberately tampered with" -

And what do the theorists say about those ancient astronauts? If they didn't evolve by themselves, then they in turn were tampered with by their own even more ancient space visitors. And who tampered with them? So we turtle ever backwards into deep time.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
10/28/2013 02:45:56 am

They are, in essence, creationists. They make aliens into angels and push God's direct creation off to another planet, where we conveniently will forever be unable to test for evidence.

Gunn
10/28/2013 09:08:08 am

Narmitaj, but the deliberate tampering with is a lie, and so the lie would continue backwards as more lies. Yes, those theorists are wrong. The Bible states where we came from, why we are here, and where we will all end up.

pat link
10/29/2013 12:21:54 am

Gunn, it makes no sense to record history for its own sake yesterday, today or tomorrow, history was/is recorded for posterity. Are we to question the historical contents of the tablets (inscribed in cuneiform writing) found in the Sumerian/Middle eastern region years ago?

Author and renowned researcher Z.Sitchen who deciphered the ancient scripts surely could not have fabricated their contents. The biblical account of creation is most certainly not in conflict with the deciphered ancient scripts, on the contrary, they clarify a rather sketchy story taken from the bible, which, I might add was/is the reason why the biblical account had a question mark hanging over it. Why should we only believe the sketchy and at times senseless biblical accounts which have been tampered with by RC religious powers centuries ago.

It all makes sense now that science has advanced and developed to the present level. Flying crafts (ufos), the magic of remotely viewing each other through the means of satellites on our TV screens, being able to communicate over vast distances through a communication device called a telephone, projecting 3D holograms, pointing at killing and immobilizing people with deadly weapons, tazers (Ark of the covenant), and not forgetting impregnating a chosen virgin female by artificial means after tranquilizing or hypnosis - Mary along with other barren biblical women charactors. What about science advancement in the manipulation of dna and genes, and the ability to clone. These are just some of the magical things experienced by the rather primitive human race during biblical times and are no longer an enigma to modern man today.

The translation/decoding of the ancient Sumerian tablets by Z.Sitchen (The lost Book of Enki) along with puzzling other incredible archeological finds around the world, tells us there were indeed visitations to this planet by physical beings from another star system or elsewhere in the distant past and, these visitors who played a pivitol role in mankind's dna advancement etc, are probably still milling about in Earth's environment in a clandestine manner (numerous sightings of ufos).

Sacqueboutier
10/27/2013 11:24:13 pm

Giorgio is their Pope. His hair is his mitre.

Reply
BigMike
10/28/2013 04:19:50 pm

And "you have to ask yourself..." is their "amen."

Reply
Only Me
10/30/2013 06:04:55 pm

Here's a fantastic summation about the AAT as myth/religion from a commenter at Above Top Secret:

I should like to suggest to you that alien/UFO narratives are genuine myths. Not purely in the sense that they are fictitious, but in the sense that they have been devised to explain and give meaning to aspects of the world that their creators find difficult to understand otherwise.

That is what myths are for, you see; they explain things people find mysterious – things like how the world and its inhabitants originated, why sex and love exist, where lightning and thunder come from, what happens to us after death, and so on. They also help us reconcile ourselves to the unpalatable realities associated with these phenomena.

The specific functions of the alien/UFO myth, like any other, vary according to the needs of the believer. The original Cold War flying-saucer craze was interpreted by Jung as a fantasy of divine salvation (from a nuclear holocaust) engendered by folk for whom conventional religion had lost its potency. Their God had failed, so they sought another in the same sky from which they had earlier hurled Him. This strain of mythmaking remains potent, as the Heaven's Gate tragedy and the ravings of the Galactic Federation of Light have recently reminded us. However, the myth has ramified, growing hydra-headed, since the 1950s, and now appears in a variety of different forms, each offering its own set of explanations and consolations.

Mythology is the oldest of our tools for understanding the world. Not surprisingly, it is also the most primitive and inaccurate. Truth in myths is, at best, 'buried behind' the narrative, as you put it. It may be there, but it has to be ferreted out of the fiction and interpreted correctly. This is usually impossible without the help of science.

Philosophy made myth obsolete by introducing a new and more powerful set of tools for understanding the world: observation, deduction, induction and argument. But philosophy relies, ultimately, on logical deduction from axiomatic principles that may not, in fact, exist.

Science was born from philosophy, but it has no truck with eternal principles. Its 'laws' are mere descriptions of how physical objects interact with one another, and they are derived from observation and experiment. Its conclusions are verifiable and repeatable. Truth in science is not 'buried behind' anything; it reveals itself unblushingly for all the world to see.

Myth is an obsolete way of understanding the world. Essentially, it is a kind of superstition. Still, it can give comfort to people who find reality unpalatable. That is why all of us, even the most rational, have myths we cherish and live by. I'm curious, though, to know what comfort people find in the belief that ancient aliens visited our planet and taught our forefathers everything worth knowing. Care to fill me in on that?

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