The New Religion: Alien Spirituality

List of UFO religions

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Copernicus hurled the Earth into orbit around the Sun, the subsequent intellectual revolution … swept the discarded remnants of the Aristotelian, geocentric Universe into the trash bin of history. Sagan puts it even more startlingly: Would the discovery make believers feel insignificant, and as a consequence, cause people to question their faith? I would argue that this concern is misguided. The claim that God is involved with and moved by humans has never required an Earth-centric theology.

The Psalms , sacred to both Jews and Christians, claim that God has given names to all the stars. According to the Talmud , God spends his night flying throughout 18, worlds. The same texts are unequivocally clear that human beings are special to God, who seems fairly able to multitask. If you believe in a God, why assume he is only able to love a few of his starchildren? But do the religious texts themselves mention the possibility of alien life?

The best theologies recognise these limitations. Weintraub thinks Evangelicals might have a difficult time with Seti, because they approach their Scriptures with a high degree of literalism. These believers maintain that any other writing or idea must be evaluated and judged by the Bible. Not finding any positive affirmation of alien life, she might conclude, like creationist Jonathan Safarti, that humans are alone in the Universe. Second, she would have to deeply reflect on the concept of the Incarnation, the Christian belief that God was fully and uniquely present in a first-century human called Jesus of Nazareth.

All paths to God, in effect, go through him. Thomas Paine famously tackled this question in his Age of Reason, in a discussion of multiple worlds. But this seems eminently absurd to Paine, which is one of the reasons he rejects Christianity. God chose a very specific way to redeem human beings.

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He sent his only Son, Jesus, to them… Did God do this for extra-terrestrials? Salvation itself might be exclusively an Earth concept. Maybe humans are uniquely bad. Or, to use religious language, maybe Earth is the only place unfortunate enough to have an Adam and Eve. Who is to say our star-siblings are morally compromised and in need of spiritual redemption?

Maybe they have attained a more perfect spiritual existence than we have at this point in our development.

On Earth, this kind of cognition is at best a few million years old. The education will go quite the other way. But some Christians who interpret the Bible quite literally might actually have an easier time incorporating the existence of aliens into their spiritual cosmology. Many Seventh-day Adventists, for example, are creationists who believe the Earth was literally created by God in six days some 6, years ago and that humans descended — and inherited original sin — from Adam and Eve.

In that line of thinking, life could exist on other planets, but beings that didn't descend from Adam and Eve on Earth wouldn't be inherently sinful, and effectively, they wouldn't need Christianity to be saved, Weintraub told Live Science. Seventh-day Adventism's flexibility with regard to aliens might be a product of the time in which the religion was founded the 19th century. During the s and s, there was a strong popular belief in extraterrestrial life , Weintraub said. The telescope a relatively recent invention finally allowed astronomers to peek at other planets and moons in our solar system, but scientists didn't yet fully understand that these celestial bodies were barren.

And perhaps it's no coincidence that the religions that began at that time — Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Baha'i Faith — all have a strong belief in extraterrestrial life, Weintraub said. In contrast, the notion of extraterrestrial life was for the most part irrelevant to religions that began thousands of years ago. They're layered below the top. In Jewish scripture, there's pretty much nothing there. You really have to over-interpret to find anything that you can marginally say might have anything to do with extraterrestrial life.

Of course, aliens have figured into the beliefs of small cults and fringe religious groups. In a famous example, 39 members of the so-called Heaven's Gate group committed suicide believing they would leave their earthly bodies and reach an alien spacecraft trailing the comet Hale-Bopp in However, the connection with these texts is not straightforward. The extensive range of Christian spiritual traditions across time are also attempts to reinterpret the wisdom of foundational scriptural texts within new historical contexts. Therefore, there is an inevitable tension between a thread of continuities in the history of Christian spirituality and the fact that particular historical expressions are always in response to specific circumstances.

This tension is expressed in an interesting way by the late Michel de Certeau, the eminent French social scientist and historian of spirituality. Christianity implies a relationship to the event which inaugurated it: It has had a series of intellectual and historical social forms which have had two apparently contradictory characteristics: Yet, the contextual nature of the event of Jesus Christ permits the contextual nature of all subsequent attempts to follow his teachings. Apart from the obvious fact that Jesus and his first disciples were Jews, the Christian scriptures grow out of the Hebrew scriptures in many different ways.

Equally, the Hebrew scriptures have had a significant impact on Christian spirituality across two thousand years from the use of the Book of Psalms in Christian liturgy and the Song of Songs in medieval Western mystical writings to the role of the Book of Exodus in lateth century spiritualities of liberation. It implies a complete way of life. This implies not simply a teacher-student relationship between Jesus and his disciples. It also implies that the Christian disciple absorbs a whole way of existence by being alongside the teacher.

The notion of Christian discipleship has two elements. The second element is actively to follow the way of Jesus. In New Testament terms, to become a disciple is not a matter either of selecting a reliable spiritual teacher or of relying on the teacher only until we have gained sufficient wisdom to move on.

Jesus is recorded as choosing his own disciples Mark 1: This involves four things. First, discipleship is not self-chosen but is a response to a call by God. Jesus is recorded as calling despised tax collectors Matt. Unusually for the time, 1st-century Palestine , there were also women in his immediate circle Luke 8: There is a tension here. On the one hand, Jesus called upon everyone to repent and to welcome the Kingdom of God. Yet, on the other hand, the call to join him in formal discipleship is only made to a select number.

Third, the call to discipleship implied a radical break with the past that involved leaving family, work, possessions for example, Luke 1: Thus, Matthew 10 lists the work of the disciple as proclaiming the good news, curing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, casting out demons Matt. The letters of St. Paul, for example, express this as participating in the cross of Jesus and in his resurrection—in other words, in the triumph of glory over suffering and life over sin and death Rom 6: This dynamic is continually strengthened by the regular celebration of the Eucharist in early Christian communities.

The notion of union with, and participation in, the life of Jesus Christ is further developed in St. Paul, who also uses the language of adoption. Second, and closely related to this, is the emphasis on discipleship as membership of a family. As already noted, Christian spirituality implies an understanding of God, the material world, and human identity.

In other words, spirituality and beliefs are inseparable.

However, as we shall see, in the study of Christian spirituality, how the relationship between beliefs and spirituality is understood has changed over the years. The fundamental point is that the varied traditions of Christian spirituality grew out of spiritual practice rather than out of abstract theory. Equally, formal definitions of Christian doctrine about God, or about Jesus Christ as both human and divine, did not arise from intellectual speculation. Christian doctrine, scripture, and the Christian life were intimately interconnected.

However, the motives behind seeking greater doctrinal precision grew from a sense that authentic living depended on maintaining right belief orthodoxy , and that misbelief or heresy led to spiritual inauthenticity. The doctrine of the Incarnation, affirming that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth there was a union of the divine and the human, not only governed all other Christian beliefs but was also the bedrock of Christian spirituality.

This heresy had two main elements. The first was a focus on esoteric knowledge. That is, true knowledge of God was reserved to a special group of initiates who inherited secret oral teachings. Second, this secret knowledge involved dualistic, anti-material beliefs. Human bodily existence is the result of sin. Humans have a fundamental spiritual nature that is trapped in the body, belongs to another world, and needs to return there. It also undermined the belief that God entered into the material world and into the human condition in the person of Jesus.

This process of clarification about the nature of Jesus Christ, his relationship to God, and the implications for the Christian life, took several hundred years to be formally defined. Two official gatherings, or Councils, of Church leaders stand out. First, the Council of Nicaea in ce condemned the heresy of Arianism named after an Egyptian priest called Arius.

Arianism denied that the nature of God could be shared or communicated. Consequently, Jesus Christ was not an uncreated equal of the eternal God as Father. Equally, there was no intimate relationship between God and humanity. This heresy was termed Monophysitism. Again, this undermined the value of the human condition. The Chalcedonian Creed affirmed that Jesus Christ had two natures and so was paradoxically both truly God and truly human. However, it did not manage to resolve precisely how this was to be understood. In the end, the focus of all this debate about doctrine was practical in relation to understanding and leading the Christian life and, indeed, to understanding the nature of human life more generally.

It is now possible to describe briefly the fundamental characteristics of Christian spirituality. However, it is too narrow to understand the call to proclaim the Kingdom simply as a verbal communication of information about God or of moral teachings. While later forms of Christian spirituality necessarily re-interpret these scriptural foundations, it is nevertheless possible to say that personal transformation and the mission to transform the world are key themes. The history of Christian spirituality is a rich and varied commentary on how these two themes have been expressed in a wide variety of spiritual movements and literature.

In the light of these values, all classic Christian spiritual traditions address certain questions, implicitly or explicitly. First, in reference to transformation, both personal and social, what needs to be transformed and why? Second, is transformation essentially individual, or does it also imply a commitment to transform society? Third, what factors stand in the way of transformation? These factors were described in religious terms, although nowadays commentators would also note the role of psychological or social and cultural factors.

Fourth, what is the context for transformation? Is it the processes of everyday life, or does it demand stepping aside into a special context for example, the desert, the monastery, or a retreat house? Fifth, how does transformation take place? This usually involves some theory about how spiritual growth takes place as well about lifestyles or spiritual practices that assist it.

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Finally, what is the purpose of transformation? In other words, classic Christian spiritual traditions offer some vision of spiritual enlightenment and human completeness. In terms of the word mission, the concept is both rich and ambiguous. For some traditionalists, it implies proselytizing—that is, converting people to Christianity. However, for others, Christianity is mission-focused in a quite different, outward-looking way.

This outward-looking approach seeks to respond to the lives and needs of others. The message of Jesus Christ demands that disciples attend to the needs of the poor and marginalized, and enable their voices to be heard. At this point it is worth summarizing the classic approaches to spiritual transformation. One widespread image in Christian spirituality is that of a pilgrimage or journey.

Thus, the theology of the early Church gradually developed a theory of successive stages on the spiritual journey. The theologian Origen c. In the following century, Gregory of Nyssa c. His metaphor was the story of Moses climbing Mount Sinai to enter deep clouds of darkness in his encounter with God.

While described as consecutive stages, in practice they are interrelated dimensions. The 6th-century Rule of St. While these classic Christian approaches to the spiritual journey may continue to offer wisdom for the present day, their purely individual approach would nowadays be balanced by a renewed biblical emphasis on collective, social understandings of spirituality. Thus, the theme of transformation in Christian spirituality is nowadays more explicitly engaged with the question of transforming society rather than simply transforming individual lives.

As has already been noted, Christianity embraces a great variety of spiritual traditions and writings. Any attempt to write an overview of Christian spirituality confronts the question of how to organize a large amount of material into an intelligible pattern. Scholars have sometimes found it helpful to define what they see as major types of Christian spirituality.

Types of spirituality are fundamentally distinctive styles of spiritual wisdom and spiritual practices with certain shared characteristics. These may be expressed in a body of literature, in meditative practices or other spiritual disciplines, in distinctive communities that practice a certain lifestyle, or in a combination of these. Having identified such types, it is then possible to develop a framework what is called a typology that enables us to compare and contrast them and thus to understand their distinctive qualities. However, typologies need to be used with caution.

They are useful tools to help people analyze the complexities of Christian spirituality. However, the notion of types is itself an act of interpretation rather than a straightforward description of reality. For the purposes of this article, I identify five types of Christian spirituality, which will now be briefly described. These types are ascetical, mystical, active, aesthetic, and finally, prophetic.

These types sometimes overlap to some degree. Thus, for example, ascetical forms of spirituality may also have mystical elements. The ascetical type of spirituality sometimes prescribes special places for the process of spiritual transformation, such as the wilderness or the monastery. Characteristically, it also describes certain disciplines or practices of self-denial, austerity, and abstention from worldly pleasures as the pathway to spiritual growth and moral perfection.

The end in view is a condition of detachment from material existence as the pathway to eternal life.

In some respects, all the major Christian spiritual traditions contain an ascetical or disciplined element. However the most familiar expression of this type is associated with monasticism. The period from the 4th to the 12th centuries ce was one of major consolidation in the history of Christianity and complex changes in its surrounding political and cultural contexts. Inevitably, this led to readjustments in self-understanding and in spiritual values.

One consequence was the expansion of counter-cultural ascetical movements that gave birth to monasticism. For the next seven centuries, the history of Christian spirituality, both East and West, was in many ways dominated by the ascetical-monastic type of spirituality. Christianity has no monopoly on monasticism. It has existed in some form in other world religions. While single Christian ascetics first appeared in the region of Syria and Palestine, structured monasticism emerged in Egypt.

This took several forms, from small groups of hermits to larger, village-like settlements, and eventually to major communities, for example associated with Pachomius c. By about ce , monasticism numbered thousands of men and women. Basil, which is still the foundation for Eastern Orthodox monasticism. In the West, two major monastic Rules emerged, the Rule of St. Augustine in 5th-century North Africa and the Rule of St.

Benedict in 6th-century Italy. Although other traditions eventually emerged, these two Rules continue to dominate Western monasticism. Notable medieval products of the Benedictine tradition, and its off-shoot the Cistercians, include a pope, Gregory the Great — ; the philosopher Anselm of Canterbury — ; the poet, musician, and artist Hildegard of Bingen — ; the mystical theologian Bernard of Clairvaux; and the English writer on human friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx.

In modern times, well-known monastic spiritual figures include the popular writer Thomas Merton — and the Eastern Orthodox nun and writer Maria Skobtsova — , who was executed by the Nazis for protecting Jews. In recent times, monasticism has re-emerged in Protestant Christianity as well as in the Anglican Communion. The mystical type of spirituality is associated with the desire for an immediacy of presence to God, frequently through contemplative practice.

It does not demand withdrawal from everyday life, but suggests that the everyday world may be transfigured into something wondrous. The mystical type is associated with intuitive knowledge of God beyond discursive reasoning and analysis. The ultimate purpose is spiritual illumination and being connected to the transcendent. A mystical dimension to Christianity existed from its beginnings. In the 6th century ce , the writings of an anonymous Syrian monk known as pseudo-Dionysius had a considerable influence in both the East and the West.

However, it is commonly suggested that in Western Christianity the period from — ce saw a particular flourishing of mysticism. This was partly because of a growing sense of the individual self after what became known as the 12th-century Renaissance, and partly as a reaction to a more philosophically driven theology. The 14th century is particularly rich in mystical writers. A number of key figures have achieved wide popularity, even outside Christianity.

Two people may be taken as examples. She became an anchoress sometime after an almost fatal illness in when, over a twenty-four hour period, she had sixteen visions provoked by the sight of a crucifix in her sick room. Her famous A Revelation of Love , in the version known as the Long Text she also wrote a Short Text , is a sophisticated vernacular work of mystical-pastoral theology, written after years of reflection for the benefit of all her fellow Christians.

But you will never know different, without end. The active type of spirituality, in a variety of ways, promotes everyday life as the principle context for the spiritual path. In this type of spirituality, people do not need to retreat from everyday concerns in order to reach spiritual enlightenment. What is needed for spiritual growth is within our reach. This type of spirituality seeks to find spiritual growth through the medium of ordinary experiences, commitments, and activity, including the service of our fellow humans.

Would Finding Alien Life Change Religious Philosophies?

Among the best-known examples of this type is the spiritual wisdom associated with Ignatius Loyola — , a 16th-century Basque noble, soldier, and finally Catholic reformer and founder of the religious order known as the Society of Jesus Jesuits. The main values of Ignatian spirituality are highlighted in his text, the Spiritual Exercises. The Spiritual Exercises is one of the most influential Christian spiritual texts, now used as a medium for retreats and spiritual guidance across an ecumenical spectrum of Christians.

It is not an inspirational text but a collection of practical notes for a retreat guide. The aim is to flexibly assist a retreatant to grow in inner freedom, to be able to respond to the call of Christ in the midst of daily life. From the Exercises , it is possible to outline certain key features of Ignatian spirituality and of the active type of spirituality more generally. First, God is encountered in the practices of everyday life.

Second, the life and death of Jesus Christ are offered as the fundamental pattern for Christian life. Third, God, in and through Jesus Christ, offers the healing and liberation needed to respond to the divine call. Fourth, spirituality focuses on a deepening desire for God in the midst of ordinary existence. Ignatius effectively summarizes a long tradition of discernment in Christian spirituality that finds its roots in ancient philosophy, notably in Aristotle.

The Exercises and the wider Ignatian tradition promote a range of spiritual practices including meditation, contemplation, and other forms of prayer, including what is known as the Examen, a brief daily practice of prayerful reflection on the events of the day and how God has been present.

The aesthetic type of spirituality covers a spectrum of ways by which the spiritual journey may be expressed in, and shaped by, the arts, music and poetry.

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