redOrbit exclusive: How religions view aliens

Emily Bills for redOrbit.com – @emilygbills

If ET suddenly came to Earth and began eating up all of our Reese’s Pieces, how would we respond? Well, in terms of religion, we would all probably respond a little differently. We interviewed David A. Weintraub, author of Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It? and astronomer professor at Vanderbilt University to help answer this question.

RO: What motivated you to research and write about the topic of religion and aliens?

Weintraub: A lot of the questions that astronomers ask overlap with the same questions or issues that religion asks: Why are we here? Why is there a universe? What are we doing here? And in the last 20 years or so as astronomers have begun to successfully discover planets around other stars, it became clear to [me] that the goal of astronomers in looking for planets isn’t to actually find the planets. What motivates astronomers looking for planets is to ask and answer the question: Are we alone in the universe?

The question, Are we alone in the universe? is fundamentally a question of who we are, and this is a religious question. So I began to think that as astronomers were starting to successfully discover planets, we were starting to step on the toes of our neighbor theologians and that it was worth starting to think about what we were doing.

Maybe it’s worth thinking about what that discovery might mean before we actually make it, so I decided to take a look to see what major religions have to say about extraterrestrial life.

RO: Which religions did you look at?

Weintraub: Most of the major religions. Roman Catholicism, most branches of Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam, and Mormonism. I didn’t deal with any religions that came into existence after 1900.

RO: So no Scientology, then?

Weintraub: No Scientology.

What I tried to do was look at the sacred writings of the religions to see what the scriptural writings had to say about extraterrestrial life if anything. If they didn’t have anything to say, that told me something. If they did have something to say, that told me something as well.

RO: Which religion had the most written about extraterrestrial life?

By far Roman Catholicism because it has the most written about everything. But most of that is all going around like a dog chasing its tail and saying the same things over and over again for 2,000 years, so they haven’t made a whole lot of progress in their ideas.

RO: What are some of the more interesting theories about aliens that you have come across?

Weintraub: Certainly some religions have strong beliefs that extraterrestrial life exists. They have no problem with the existence of extraterrestrial life, and I found that in and of itself interesting. Islam I would say surprised me a little bit in that the sacred writings of Islam seemed to make very clear that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists elsewhere in the universe. My bet is that probably most Muslims are not aware of that because it’s not the sort of thing most people are paying attention to when they are praying on a daily basis. But Islamic scholars that have looked for it know it’s there, and that surprised me.

Mormonism (probably not surprising to most people who know about Mormonism), but Mormons seem to agree that there is extraterrestrial life out there and their ideas about it are more robust than other religions – they have more developed ideas on how many other populated worlds there are.

Whereas for most Christians, the idea of populated other worlds is not something that they would easily accept. This is actually odd because for most of the last 2,000 years, most Christians have been pretty big on the idea of extraterrestrial life, and it’s actually only been in fairly recent times that devout Christians have shied away from the idea. Christianity has gone through cycles on this. For the first 1,200 years of Christianity, the idea of extraterrestrial life was a no-no. And then for 600 or 700 years, everybody believed in it, and then it became a no-no again. Now it depends on which flavor of Christianity you’re following. But if you’re a Creationist – we’re it. And if you are a very liberal Christian then extraterrestrial life is fine. Christianity is all over the map on this topic.

RO: What about some of the other religions? How do they view the possible existence of alien life?

Weintraub: Judaism doesn’t really have an opinion on it. Judaism couldn’t care. And Hinduism and Buddhism seem pretty content with the idea that anything is possible, that with reincarnation, the universe is a big place and you could get reincarnated anywhere. [They believe] that life is possible anywhere and there is nothing that would preclude your spirit from being reincarnated into a living being anywhere in the universe at any moment.

RO: Would you say that any religions would be strengthened by the discovery of ET?

Weintraub: Any religion that believes in or accepts the idea of extraterrestrial life would be strengthened by it, and that’s almost all religions except Fundamentalist Christianity right now. And I would say strengthened in the fact that if you could point to some part in your scripture and say, “My scripture says there’s life out there,” and then astronomers discover life out there, you would then want to point back to your scripture and say, “My scripture must be right.”

If what you believe is that God has infinite power to do anything He wants to do, an example would be Judaism,  if we discover that there’s life out there, that just demonstrates that indeed God is incredibly powerful.

The only religions that would be threatened would be religions that have taken the position that we’re it and that God’s attention is focused solely on Earth, and they have decided that because extraterrestrial life is not mentioned in their scriptures that that’s proof that extraterrestrials don’t exist.

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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113393634/redorbit-exclusive-how-religions-view-aliens-051915/