Novalee
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We know what it is . It is not what you are putting forth .its settled already
https://www.quantamagazine.org/entanglement-made-simple-20160428/
Do you believe in God?
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https://www.quantamagazine.org/entanglement-made-simple-20160428/
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Neither is Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed, but it doesn't seem to harm their ideas any.
UKMikey
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Perhaps the universe is like a brontosaurus with multiple brains. Shoot it in the metaphorical tail end and it could take millennia for the signal to reach its central brain if it has one. However, I'll leave it to the panpsychicists to convince the rest of us one way or the other.
Dotini
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Last week The New York Times published interviews with a half dozen Navy pilots who interacted with UFOs and provided official US Navy video and pilot log books to prove it. The general reaction of mainstream media was to say, okay, UFOs are real and we just have to get used to it. Everybody involved in all this is going to great lengths to avoid saying anything about aliens, although that is admittedly the leading hypothesis. So far the unseen and unheard elephant in the room that prevents discussion of aliens is all the weirdness and woo-woo (psychic affects, abduction, etc.) traditionally associated with aliens. IMO, weirdness and woo-woo are a potential threat to civilization, the science and religious paradigms we hold dear. Recently an author who was atheist and a professor of religious studies wrote a book about our culture and its shifting beliefs in aliens, religion, technology and how we deal with weirdness. Below is an interesting interview.
The new American religion of UFOs
Belief in aliens is like faith in religion — and may come to replace it.
By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Jun 4, 2019, 8:10am EDTSHARE
Image of a UFO in the town of Roswell, New Mexico.
Getty Images/iStockphoto
It’s a great time to believe in aliens.
Last week, the New York Times published a viral article about reports of UFOs off the East Coast in 2014 and 2015. It included an interview with five Navy pilots who witnessed, and in some cases recorded, mysterious flying objects with “no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes” that appeared to “reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.”
No one is quite sure what they saw, but the sightings are striking. And they’re part of a growing fascination with the possibility of intelligent alien life.
According to Diana Pasulka, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the new book American Cosmic, belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials is becoming a kind of religion — and it isn’t nearly as fringe as you might think.
More than half of American adults and over 60 percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This tracks pretty closely with belief in God, and if Pasulka is right, that’s not an accident.
Her book isn’t so much about the truth of UFOs or aliens as it is about what the appeal of belief in those things says about our culture and the shifting roles of religion and technology in it. On the surface, it’s a book about the popularity of belief in aliens, but it’s really a deep look at how myths and religions are created in the first place and how human beings deal with unexplainable experiences.
A lightly edited transcript of my conversation with Pasulka follows.
Sean Illing
You describe belief in UFOs and aliens as the latest manifestation of a very old impulse: a religious impulse. What is it about extraterrestrials that captivates so many people?
Diana Pasulka
One way we can make sense of this by using a very old but functional definition of religion as simply the belief in nonhuman and supernatural intelligent beings that often descend from the sky. There are many definitions of religion, but this one is pretty standard.
There is another distinction about belief in nonhuman extraterrestrial intelligence, or UFO inhabitants, that makes it distinct from the types of religions with which we are most familiar. I’m a historian of Catholicism, for instance, and what I find when I interact with people in Catholic communities is that they have faith that Jesus walked on water and that the Virgin Mary apparitions were true.
But there’s something different about the UFO narrative. Here we have people who are actual scientists, like Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA, who are willing to go on TV and basically make announcements like, “We are going to find extraterrestrial life.” Now, she’s not exactly talking about intelligent extraterrestrial life, but that’s not how many people interpret her.
She says we’re going to find life, we’re going to find habitable planets and things like that. So that gives this type of religiosity a far more powerful bite than the traditional religions, which are based on faith in things unseen and unprovable.
But the belief that UFOs and aliens are potentially true, and can potentially be proven, makes this a uniquely powerful narrative for the people who believe in it.
Is it fair to call this a new form of religion? I think so.
Sean Illing
We’ll definitely get into the religious parallels, but first I want to clear up some misconceptions about the nature of these beliefs and the people behind them. Tell me about the “Invisible College.” Who are these people, and what are they doing?
Diana Pasulka
The “Invisible College” is an old idea that comes from the 17th-century British philosopher Francis Bacon, and it was meant to describe the work of scientists that challenged contemporary beliefs of the church.
There were two incredible modern scientists, Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, who revived the idea. Hynek passed away in 1986, but he’s actually the star character in the History Channel’s show Project Blue Book. Vallée is still here, and he’s an astronomer and a computer scientist who worked on ARPANET, which was the military precursor to the internet.
Basically, Hynek and Vallée called themselves the “Invisible College” once they started to believe the things they were investigating were somehow either extraterrestrial or interdimensional. They were part of a group of scientists that were known to each other but were not known to the general public, and who quietly pursued this research on their own time.
Sean Illing
That sounds ... weird.
Diana Pasulka
Well, it is weird. I didn’t expect to confront this when I started my book. In fact, I almost stopped my book a number of times because I thought it was so odd. I started this project as an atheist who was never really interested in UFOs or aliens.
So once I started engaging with the scientists who were doing this work, who believed in the reality of extraterrestrial intelligence, who believed they were reverse-engineering technology from what they insisted was alien aircraft, I was stunned.
What’s strange today is that these scientists don’t really talk to each other the way they did in, say, the 1970s. Now they’re much more compartmentalized and worried about attracting too much attention or having their research distorted, so they work in the shadows and mostly independently.
I met with five or six of them, each of whom are working on different things. And these are all extremely educated people who have prestigious positions at credible agencies or research institutions.
Sean Illing
Can you give me a sense of the kind of people you’re talking about and the kinds of positions they occupy?
Diana Pasulka
One of the scientists I met with, who I call Tyler in the book, has worked on most of the space shuttle missions, and he’s founded biotechnology companies worth several million dollars. Another scientist, who I call James, is an endowed chair of science at one of the nation’s top universities, and he has at least two laboratories under his control.
So these are the sorts of people I interacted with — and say what you will of their beliefs and their research, they can’t be dismissed as unserious or ignorant.
Sean Illing
You admit in the book to experiencing an “epistemological shock” to your understanding of the world after reading this literature and engaging with the scientists and believers behind the movement. Did they convince you that there’s something here?
Diana Pasulka
I wouldn’t call myself an atheist any longer, but I also wouldn’t say that I’m a believer. I don’t quite believe that there are extraterrestrials. I would say, though, that these scientists have discovered something that is truly anomalous, but I’m not in a position to say what it is or where it came from.
All I can say is that I was shocked to discover the level of scientific inquiry into extraterrestrial life. I thought I was going to interview people who just saw these things and I was going to basically say, well, you know, this is the new structure for belief in aliens and UFOs.
I had no clue that there were actually people at top universities that were studying these things on their own, that there was a whole underground network of people doing the same work, and that there was much more to this than most people imagine.
Since journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal have published two articles in the New York Times, one in December 2017, and the second one last week, focusing on the military’s involvement in programs associated with UFOs and materials of UFOs, there has been a lot of public interest in the subject, even among my colleagues who used to scoff at the notion.
Sean Illing
What shocked you, exactly?
Diana Pasulka
Shortly after I started working on this book, I began to get inquiries from scientists who were interested in talking with me specifically, in person, about what I was writing. Frankly, I was very suspicious of them at first and didn’t want to engage.
But one of the scientists I mentioned a minute ago, Tyler, asked me if I’d go to a place in New Mexico with him. Tyler is a materials scientist and was involved in the space shuttle program almost his entire life. The location he wanted to bring me to is a kind of ground zero for the UFO religion. I said I’d go if I could bring somebody, so I brought a colleague of mine who is a molecular scientist.
So we travel to New Mexico and Tyler brings us to this site blindfolded, which was very weird but part of our agreement. He didn’t want us to know where we were exactly. But we get out there and we actually find some things that are quite odd, and we take them and study them more closely.
Now, the backstory here dates to the 1940s and the mythology of Roswell, New Mexico, as the alleged site of various UFO crashes. The place we went to wasn’t Roswell, but it was nearby. Anyway, what we found was undeniably strange, and I still don’t really understand what it was or how it got there.
I have to say, though, it gave me serious pause.
Sean Illing
Can you describe what you found? What did it look like? Why was it so strange?
Diana Pasulka
It’s very hard to describe. One of the materials, a kind of metal alloy, looked like metallic frog skin. There was another material we found, but I was asked by Tyler not to describe it publicly or in the book. But if you’re looking for more context about the sort of materials we found, you can read the New York Times story that ran in 2017.
Sean Illing
One explanation is that this piece of supposed alien wreckage was planted there by Tyler.
Diana Pasulka
No question. I open the book with this story and I never conclude whether it’s true or not, whether it was planted or not. My job as a scholar of religion isn’t to determine whether religious beliefs are true; I’m interested in the effects of the belief itself.
But as for the evidence we found, I hate to be equivocal about it, but I honestly still don’t know what it was. I just can’t explain it. The material we discovered, and the other pieces of evidence that have emerged, are genuinely anomalous, and that’s about the most we can say about it.
Do aliens actually exist? I don’t know. But my book is more about this new form of religiosity and how it’s becoming more influential among scientists and people in Silicon Valley and Americans more generally.
There’s the idea that technology like artificial intelligence is going to kill us, but then there’s this idea that technology will be our savior, which is a very religious idea. So there’s already a kind of dichotomy around technology. But the point is that no matter what you think about technology and its impact on human life, there’s no denying its importance.
Whether we’re worried about technology destroying us or whether we’re hoping it will save us, we’re all more or less convinced that it will be at the center of our future, and aliens in so many ways play the role of technological angels.
Sean Illing
I’m curious how religious authorities you interacted with regard this belief in extraterrestrial life. If we were to learn that alien life exists, it would completely upend the religious worldview. Do they see it as a threat?
Diana Pasulka
It’s a fascinating question. There are definitely people who believe that the revelation of alien life would completely change religions, but I don’t see it that way. If you look at a lot of religions, they already incorporate ideas of UFOs.
If you look at different forms of Buddhism, for example, you have types of Bodhisattvas that appear to be floating on discs and things like that. I spend a lot of time at the Vatican, and there are people there like astronomer Guy Consolmagno (author of the book Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?) who wouldn’t blink an eye if alien life suddenly appeared.
I actually think secularists and atheists would be more troubled. Because of popular depictions of aliens and movies like Independence Day, people are primed to see aliens as an existential threat, some superior invading force. But religious people, at least the ones I interact with, would regard aliens as just another being created by God.
But there’s no doubt that the discovery of a nonhuman intelligence would be profound, and it’s impossible to know how much it would alter our perception of ourselves and our place in the universe.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/4/18632778/ufo-aliens-american-cosmic-diana-pasulka
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Dotini
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This is a potentially serious topic, and Bob is on record saying that life is too short to be serious on a video gamer forum. He has a good point there, so I can't blame him for being grumpy. The point of life is to reproduce and be happy. Once we've done that, then what? Deal with the 800 lb gorilla?
UKMikey
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https://michaelshermer.com/2002/01/shermers-last-law/What if they're the same, Bob, what if they're the same?!
Now we can merge the two threads! (Note to mods: please don't merge the threads)
BobK
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That's not what I'm saying at all. It's just that you frequently post your alien/UFO stuff in the "Do you believe in God" thread where it's very much off-topic (even if belief if aliens is almost "religious" for some) even though we have other threads where it would be much more on-topic.
Dotini
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Just as the skeptic Shermer says in the piece posted by @UKMikey, "Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God". One of the pilots said the object stopped right beside him and it took the shape of a cube inside a transparent sphere, a vision similar to that found in the Book of Enoch. Lots of religious symbolic communication is historically found in geometry. I can't think of a thread where the here-and-now reality of (potential) contact with non-human intelligence and super-technology beyond our physics would be more on-topic than this one. But I admit it may not be to everyone's preference or taste. I would like your leave to continue such posting here. But if it's really that psychologically bothersome, I respectfully will oblige you.
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Dotini
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Elsewhere in our forums we duly noted the purpose of human life was reproduction and pleasure-seeking. However, some say we humans have an innate need for significance and meaning. While I strongly doubt that, I note that an opinion piece, (written a couple of years ago) from the New York Times finds that while Americans are becoming much more secular, research indicates we still have an active spiritual/religious mind, and asks how society can fulfill these needs.
This happy talk is challenged by fundamentalists.
Opinion
GRAY MATTER
Don’t Believe in God? Maybe You’ll Try U.F.O.s
By Clay Routledge
- July 21, 2017
Image
CreditCreditMarion Fayolle
Are Americans becoming less religious? It depends on what you mean by “religious.”
Polls certainly indicate a decline in religious affiliation, practice and belief. Just a couple of decades ago, about 95 percent of Americans reported belonging to a religious group. This number is now around 75 percent. And far fewer are actively religious: The percentage of regular churchgoers may be as low as 15 to 20 percent. As for religious belief, the Pew Research Center found that from 2007 to 2014 the percentage of Americans who reported being absolutely confident God exists dropped from 71 percent to 63 percent.
Nonetheless, there is reason to doubt the death of religion, or at least the death of what you might call the “religious mind” — our concern with existential questions and our search for meaning. A growing body of research suggests that the evidence for a decline in traditional religious belief, identity and practice does not reflect a decline in this underlying spiritual inclination.
Ask yourself: Why are people religious to begin with? One view is that religion is an ancient way of understanding and organizing the world that persists largely because societies pass it down from generation to generation. This view is related to the idea that the rise of science entails the fall of religion. It also assumes that the strength of religion is best measured by how much doctrine people accept and how observant they are.
This view, however, does not capture the fundamental nature of the religious mind — our awareness of, and need to reckon with, the transience and fragility of our existence, and how small and unimportant we seem to be in the grand scheme of things. In short: our quest for significance.
Dozens of studies show a strong link between religiosity and existential concerns about death and meaning. For example, when research participants are presented with stimuli that bring death to mind or challenge a sense of meaning in life, they exhibit increased religiosity and interest in religious or spiritual ideas. Another body of research shows that religious beliefs provide and protect meaning.
Furthermore, evidence suggests that the religious mind persists even when we lose faith in traditional religious beliefs and institutions. Consider that roughly 30 percent of Americans report they have felt in contact with someone who has died. Nearly 20 percent believe they have been in the presence of a ghost. About one-third of Americans believe that ghosts exist and can interact with and harm humans; around two-thirds hold supernatural or paranormal beliefs of some kind, including beliefs in reincarnation, spiritual energy and psychic powers.
These numbers are much higher than they were in previous decades, when more people reported being highly religious. People who do not frequently attend church are twice as likely to believe in ghosts as those who are regular churchgoers. The less religious people are, the more likely they are to endorse empirically unsupported ideas about U.F.O.s, intelligent aliens monitoring the lives of humans and related conspiracies about a government cover-up of these phenomena.
An emerging body of research supports the thesis that these interests in nontraditional supernatural and paranormal phenomena are driven by the same cognitive processes and motives that inspire religion. For instance, my colleagues and I recently published a series of studies in the journal Motivation and Emotion demonstrating that the link between low religiosity and belief in advanced alien visitors is at least partly explained by the pursuit of meaning. The less religious participants were, we found, the less they perceived their lives as meaningful. This lack of meaning was associated with a desire to find meaning, which in turn was associated with belief in U.F.O.s and alien visitors.
When people are searching for meaning, their minds seem to gravitate toward thoughts of things like aliens that do not fall within our current scientific inventory of the world. Why? I suspect part of the answer is that such ideas imply that humans are not alone in the universe, that we might be part of a larger cosmic drama. As with traditional religious beliefs, many of these paranormal beliefs involve powerful beings watching over humans and the hope that they will rescue us from death and extinction.
A great many atheists and agnostics, of course, do not think U.F.O.s exist. I’m not suggesting that if you reject traditional religious belief, you will necessarily find yourself believing in alien visitors. But because beliefs about U.F.O.s and aliens do not explicitly invoke the supernatural and are couched in scientific and technological jargon, they may be more palatable to those who reject the metaphysics of more traditional religious systems.
It is important to note that thus far, research indicates only that the need for meaning inspires these types of paranormal beliefs, not that such beliefs actually do a good job of providing meaning. There are reasons to suspect they are poor substitutes for religion: They are not part of a well-established social and institutional support system and they lack a deeper and historically rich philosophy of meaning. Seeking meaning does not always equal finding meaning.
The Western world is, in theory, becoming increasingly secular — but the religious mind remains active. The question now is, how can society satisfactorily meet people’s religious and spiritual needs?
Clay Routledge is a professor of psychology at North Dakota State University.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/opinion/sunday/dont-believe-in-god-maybe-youll-try-ufos.html
This happy talk is challenged by fundamentalists.
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All life forms exploit their environment to survive, sentient life forms gain an understanding of the things that happen in their world (i.e. their frame of reference) to inform their best chances of survival. Bells don't automatically ring in the world just before food arrives, but in the world of Pavlov's dogs they do. Animals with a will to survive (which is generally all animals) instinctively attach significance and meaning to things because it's beneficial to that survival.
Humans are particularly advanced and have a strong record of theorising about the earth, light, wind and water that they have always understood as necessary for survival. When particular theories about their nature become personalised, deified and (in some cases) legally mandatory you have a set of beliefs that we define as religion.
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Novalee
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Not exactly haha . I was thinking more along the lines of the isle of lesbo .Rape, necromancy and eternal torture more your kind of thing, eh?
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Ah, that's a Greek god, and one with a winkle at that. Some of the island's goddesses were ladies, supposedly, but that's disputed by scholars of all things Greek.
If it's a holy world full of excess you're after I'd heartily recommend northern Germanic religion (of which Norse religion is but one spur). Or druids, they're known to be mad for it.
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Although you may end up a little thor.
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Dotini
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Is survival the purpose of life? I can do better than that, and say experience is the purpose of life.
There is a religious tradition which holds that we are all little pieces of God, undergoing experiences which actualize God's consciousness in the physical world. It must be hard work actualizing reality from consciousness, and I expect that quite a few defects and problems crop up along the way.
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Dotini
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Good question.My remark was based upon the traditional premise (in some religions) that the physical world was created and is maintained by a cosmic consciousness for the purposes of experiencing physical reality, including the stars, Sun, animals, people and their thinking, emotions and all their works. Working from that premise, defects and problems would cover a very wide range indeed. From basic astrophysics to geology, chemistry, biology and on to the social sciences, occasionally some tweakings, patches and fixes will be needed to keep the whole ball of wax working according to plan. Even the best of carpenters will inevitably face a do-over or two. And carpenters employ helpers.
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This raises a few questions.
First, which religions would these be? I'm not sure I've ever come across one where the reason for creation was purely for the experience. The simulation hypothesis is similar, and I'm sure someone, somewhere has tried to make a religion around it, but I've never heard of one making it beyond the few-beers-in-a-pub stage.
Second, why would the cosmic consciousness go to the trouble of creating this universe rather than anything else with their time/space/resources/strange cosmic consciousness stuff?
Third, if we're working from the premise that the universe is a created thing that undergoes revision to improve it, why would we expect to be at a stage where problems or defects would be visible to us? We could be in anything from the first draft to the most polished final edit.
Fourth, how do we tell what's a defect? Which observed behaviours are bugs and which are features? For example, is radioactivity an unintended consequence of an insufficiently complex atomic simulation or of shoddy coding, or is it supposed to be like that?
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