When Religious Aliens Come Knocking

Aliens, as in extraterrestrials, come in all manner of shapes and sizes at least according to science fiction authors, TV produces, filmmakers and even scientists. We have to rely on them since we don’t yet have an alien on the slab in the lab for verification. Our potential aliens also have all manner of philosophies and intentions – invasion and sex usually dominate. But what about religion: their existence and impact on our religion and of greater importance, their religion’s impact on us.

But, and this is a very real but, what if our advanced aliens are not just technologically advanced aliens, but theologically advanced aliens, who in fact have a theology that bears no similarity with any terrestrial theology! Then what? Might ET take a leaf out of our religious histories and violently preach their version of hellfire and brimstone to us? What leaf you ask?

The basic reality is that members of the trilogy of major monotheistic religions (and lots of minor ones as well) have in the past wished, and continue to wish, to impose their beliefs by any means fair or foul (usually foul) on anyone and everyone else. If fact, all too often those wishes were turned into reality.

If one had to list all of the atrocities inflicted on various cultures by Christian missionaries, including the abduction and indoctrination of young children, well let’s just say comparisons with totalitarian regimes wouldn’t be all that inappropriate. From across Africa to the Pacific Islands and points beyond, it was the Christian duty of the faithful to force-feed if necessary their religious doctrines to all those thus far spared monotheism fanaticism. And it wasn’t just a matter of polytheistic to monotheistic conversion, it was the absolute and total destruction of anything and everything part and parcel of their ‘pagan’ traditional beliefs that had to be eliminated, so much so that most of the culture, say of the Aztecs and the Incas, have now been lost forever – thanks due to God, or rather His ever faithful representatives.

Then throw in the Inquisition, the Crusades, and all manner of Holy Wars and God’s Old Testament reign of terror has been taken to heart by the faithful whose duty is to see that it is ‘to be continued’ and on, and on, and on it goes. Your option: be a living Christian; or a dead pagan.

Although you’d hope that advanced alien beings would have long since out-evolved such religious nonsense, that’s not a given. That missionary scenario is even more frightening than them coming here with their ray-guns blasting away IMHO. So if those extraterrestrial evangelists come knocking at your door, with tales about the Holy Ooze, or the Almighty Greater Greener Slime Supreme Being, be afraid, be very afraid!