12/27/21: OLD TIME SYNCRETISM
MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
In our household, we got a new TV for Christmas — our old one bit the dust and so I have been watching some movies on our bigger and better high-definition screen. I went back and watched the Matrix Resurrections and was seriously thinking about renting the new Spiderman movie so I could see it on our new TV.
I got caught up in a Raiders of the Lost Ark marathon on the Paramount Channel — and then the next day I was noticing that there was an Avengers marathon. I happened upon a repeat of the movie, Dr. Strange.
I forgot how deep the movie goes into the quantum universe, and quantum immortality. All of this new science explains a lot of the unknowns that are indistinguishable from magic and now what was once fantasy can now be explained in some dime store quantum explanation.
Quantum Mechanics is the stepping-stone between ourselves and the Universe, between what we want and making it actually happen in the natural.
Perhaps the most renowned of its mysteries is the fact that the outcome of a quantum experiment can change depending on whether or not we choose to measure some property of the particles involved.
When this “observer effect” was first noticed by the early pioneers of quantum theory, they were deeply troubled. It seemed to undermine the basic assumption behind all science: that there is an objective world out there, irrespective of us. If the way the world behaves depends on how or if we look at it, what can “reality” really mean?
It does not exactly determine “what is real”. But it might affect the chance that each of the possible actualities permitted by quantum mechanics is the one we do in fact observe, in a way that quantum theory itself cannot predict.
Like breathing, we take for granted how our mind puts everything together. We can dream the dream of the alien and here there songs and maybe even their cries for help. The signals we are receiving could all be part of some dimensional reply to the various attempts at communication at CERN or elsewhere.
Evolutionary biology suggests life has progressed from a one-dimensional reality, to two dimensions to three dimensions, and there’s no scientific reason to think that the evolution of life stops there.
Advanced civilizations would certainly have changed the algorithms so that instead of being trapped in the linear dimensions we find ourselves in, their consciousness moves through the multiverse and beyond.
We know that the space between stars is vast, and light takes thousands of years to travel between them. In the time it takes an alien message to reach us, they may have been destroyed by a plague, a meteor impact. They could have destroyed themselves through war or environmental devastation. The message we receive could be the last cosmic breath of a dead civilization.
Basically, signals from long past affecting us in the present. This creates a causality conundrum, and it can be left for the physicists to determine whether or not we are receiving cosmic messages in quantum bottles.
The problem of “who observes whom” is crucial. Although it seems a little far-fetched to say that reality only exists while observed — the stars are the reality we see in the night sky that may or may not be there at present.
Seeing is not necessarily believing and hearing is not necessarily the result of communicating.
On Christmas day, NASA and its international partners launched to orbit the James Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion telescope that has taken 30 years to design and build. The telescope “has been described as a ‘time machine’ that could help unravel the secrets of our universe, with distant objects emitting light from further back in time,”
The telescope will be used to look back to the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago.
The goal of this powerful device is to unravel the mysteries of supermassive black holes, distant alien worlds, stellar explosions, dark matter, and more.
It appears however that NASA may be a little concerned about what it may find and how it will affect our belief in both God and life out in space.
NASA is recruiting priests and theologians to assess how the world’s major religions would react to the news of discovering extraterrestrial life and advise the agency on how to quell civil unrest upon the revelation.
They enlisted 24 religious experts to develop protocols for the discovery of alien life in its Center for Theological Inquiry program at Princeton University in New Jersey.
NASA provided CTI with a $1.1 million grant to create the program devoted to researching “the societal implications of astrobiology” in 2015.
According to its website, CTI “builds bridges of understanding by convening theologians, scientists, scholars and policymakers to think together — and inform public thinking — on global concerns.
Just before Christmas, The Times of London called attention to the NASA program in a report featuring interviews with NASA experts.
NASA is invested in “serious scholarship being published in books and journals” addressing the “profound wonder and mystery and implication of finding microbial life on another planet,” Will Storrar, the director of CTI, told the publication.
Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison, a priest and theologian at the University of Cambridge with a doctorate in biochemistry from Oxford, is among the two dozen religious experts recruited for the “alien preparation” effort.
In a recent blog post shared on the University of Cambridge website, Davis summarizes his work to date with NASA.
The Priest wrote the following:
“I am researching and writing a survey of the main topics in Christian belief – what is sometimes called ‘systematic theology’ – from the perspective of life elsewhere in the universe. I am thinking about its bearing on the doctrines of creation, sin, the person and work of Jesus, redemption, revelation, eschatology, and so on,”
“So far, my attention has mainly been focused on what theologians call Christology: the discussion of who Jesus was, and in particular of what it would mean to hold that he is both human and divine. The most significant question there is probably whether one would respond theologically to the prospect of life elsewhere in terms of there having been many incarnations, or only the one theologians talk about in Jesus. I have also been thinking about the doctrine of creation, especially in terms of how it deals with themes of multiplicity and diversity.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation demanded NASA revoke its funding to CTI, arguing the grant provided by the government to religious research violates the separation of church and state.
In 2017, FFRF obtained 550 documents from NASA in a Freedom of Information Act request. According to documents provided obtained by FFRF, research proposed by NASA for the grant includes:
Formulating a “Christian response” to scientific studies on morality,
Developing a new model of biblical interpretation.
Relating themes from First Corinthians, a book in the Christian Bible, to astrobiology.
Reconciling a potential astrobiology discovery with Christian theology.
Looking at how astrobiology would affect the Christian doctrine of redemption.
Examining Christian ethics and Christian doctrines of human obligation.
Looking at societal implications of astrobiology with “theological ethics.”
Writing a monograph on Christian forgiveness.
While the mainstream media in the Unites States is far more interested in boring political diatribes — the rest of the world is curious as to why NASA is becoming serious about protocols and policies regarding the announcement of the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
The event most certainly will cause a social transition. Most of us believe that the revelation will not affect us because we have matured intellectually — but as the government has infantilized the general public with COVID-19 restrictions and other such nonsense, you begin to wonder just how sophisticated we truly are.
We all think that as a society we have matured — that we are older and wiser, We follow the science. We just do what we’re told.
We read the papers about the new government report about UFOs or what they now call UAPs. There are some things we just don’t know but others that we think we do, just like the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies.
We have been warned that the ancient watchers would return — the watchers of course is a religious term given in Old testament writings for the Titans– a race of beings known as the Grigori and Nephilim — a group of “men from the sky” that mated with the daughters of men — to create hybrids that God saw as derelict.
Some however were seen as older and wiser gods and if you believe the ancient alien theories they were part of an older family of human ancestors that became a breakaway civilization that seeded this planet.
The idea that our species might have smarter older siblings is one that many people find deeply disturbing and threatening. On the other hand, with 100 billion stars in the galaxy, is it really rational to insist that we must be the only intelligent life form in the universe?
The question has been asked over and over again but now the threat is not the possibility of alien hostility — the idea that God will be replaced, or that the revelation of alines will somehow contradict the bible.
For the most part, religions and UFO’s were not taken seriously until after the Heavens Gate suicides in early 1997. Since that time, more and more scholarly attention has been given to UFOs aliens and religions as well as to the religious motifs found in the more general ufological subculture.
But if you know your history you will find that in the early churches there was always room for syncretism.
Many do not know the definition of Syncretism and so to put it simply it is the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.
This included the idea of beings that shared the cosmos with humans and that they too were creations of an all mighty God.
The theory of the plurality of worlds became even more fashionable after the invention of the telescope. This created more speculative ideas about various tribes and civilizations among the stars.
From approximately 1600 to 1900 there was first a trickle, then a flood of scientific/philosophical/theological speculation on the nature of extraterrestrial life.
Such speculation often came from the best scientists of the day. Sir William Herschel (1730-1822), the astronomer who discovered Uranus (1781), claimed that he saw near-certain evidence of forests, circular buildings, canals, roads, and pyramids on the moon — all, of course, signs of lunarians. He was equally certain that the known planets of our solar system were all peopled and insisted the sun was “a most magnificent habitable globe” filled with solarians “whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe.” Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), William’s son, inherited both his father’s science and his fantasies; he argued that since the front side of the moon was apparently dead, lunarians must live on the dark side.
Johann Bode (1747-1826), a director of the Berlin Observatory and famous for Bode’s Law, asked of these same solarians, “Who would doubt their existence?” The reason for such certainty was quasi-theological. “The most wise author of the world assigns an insect lodging on a grain of sand and will certainly not permit…the great ball of the sun to be empty of creatures and still less of rational inhabitants who are ready gratefully to praise the author of life.” The same reasoning led him to affirm the existence of extra-terrestrials on the moon, Mercury, and Venus.
If belief in solarians, lunarians, jupiterians, venusians, mercurians, and martians seems madness now, during the 18th and 19th centuries it was taken to be the only rational, scientifically grounded view. Small wonder, then, that theologians — both Christian and deist — felt not only inspired but obliged to incorporate extra-terrestrials into their systems.
Looking first at the Christian attempts, one notices immediately that the doctrine of the cosmic god-like Incarnation underwent a transformation as well-intentioned Christians rushed to keep up with the latest menagerie of extraterrestrials.
This would go on until science demanded hard evidence of extra-terrestrials. During the 20th century, there was an onslaught of UFO activity, reports of contemporary alien encounters, landings like in Roswell, secret cover-ups and conspiracies. These activities have become part of some cloak and dagger investigations that sometimes yielded intriguing finds – but they are dismissed by a science that has become dogmatic on the subject.
Jacques Vallée has pointed out, “If UFOs are acting at the mythic and spiritual level it will be almost impossible to detect it by conventional methods and that UFO experiences can be similar or are similar to spiritual experiences.”
Psychologists studying religion have long suspected that a belief in the paranormal can be a kind of shield from the even harsher truths of the world. The idea is that when something unexpected happens the brain scrambles around for answers, looking for meaning in the chaos.
More people asking questions about extraterrestrials as to whether or not a belief in them compromises religious faith.
Especially Christian faith – and those in powerful positions in the churches see aliens as a threat to their various congregations and so they dismiss them as fallen angels or demons.
There is no reason for this as the possibility of these beings existing has not threatened the belief in God in any way.
Disclosure is a deeper issue that strikes at core beliefs and while we think we are cosmically mature enough to accept the “truth”– we may not be able to handle the complexity of such revelations.
The metaphor of the UFO, the alien, the conspiracy, and the final possession or surrender of earth and its inhabitants is slowly replacing the chariot of fire, the angel, evil, and the final judgment and rapture of the faithful into the presence of God.
This seems to be the prevailing philosophy of the information underground.
We look at religion with our eyes squinting through a small hole. Equally Science seems to be looking through the same hole with eyes skewed and sees things in a different way.
In the small hole, we see simple encounters throughout history as being godly and angelic and as the hole widens through time we see a new perspective that rips the hole even wider.
We start to see a new religious and scientific synthesis taking place where man learns that his origins cannot be completely explained with science or religion unless we apply a migratory hypothesis. Man and his counterparts in the universe have quite possibly hopped from planet to planet and that the Genesis that we read about in the Bible is only part of the story and not all of it.
Cracking open the Bible we can read in the 13th chapter of Isaiah that whatever these advanced beings are – they come from faraway lands and from the ends of the heavens and they have the powers bestowed upon them by God to carry out his wrath if need be.
The Bible could be a book that explains the origins and the future of man in such a way not to upset or provoke a harsh response. It uses mythologies and metaphors that try to tell the story in storybook form. It doesn’t t want to reveal everything, it leaves the reader with the responsibility to use wisdom and realize that we have everything God has right at our fingertips and if we apply them then we will find the truth. We will be able to figure out where we came from. What our origins truly are.
We need to reach through the veil and see beyond the cover that is draped over our minds and see the truth. Beyond the dressing and the and beyond the trappings of religious dogma and the egoism of science.
