As infidels are wont to tell us, people in Bible times were gullible and superstitious. The same holds true for Christians today–unlike modern, skeptical, science-minded infidels. Or so they tell us.
On the other hand:
According to a survey of 1,003 adults conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University...But the experts were quite surprised by other trends found among the UFO witnesses. People who have attended church recently and who identify themselves as born-again Evangelical Protestants are much less likely to have seen UFOs or to believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence than people with little or no involvement with organized religion.
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/34758
See? Christians are so invested in their irrational belief system that they will arrogantly and unthinkingly deny the obvious possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if dispensationalism might start to change that statistic a bit...it seems like more than a few dispensationalists are into the whole "ancient astronaut" thing.
ReplyDeleteThis seems to lend credence to my personal theory that UFOs are demonic in origin. A new kind of superstition cultivated for a scientific age.
ReplyDeleteI would suggest that the most pernicious secular superstition of the last fifteen years has not been UFOs but the recovered memory movement. Unfortunately the whole "healing of memories" ministry movement just piggy-backed off that. UFO sightings and abduction experiences may actually be a secular correspondence to demonization in some ways but I don't feel like delving into secular psychological theories about how demonization only tends to get reported in families with both a cultural and familial connection to Christian belief. In Western contexts there have not been many reports of demonization symptoms in fully secular homes. An experience in which an outside force shows up and suppresses your will does suggest that UFO experiences have many parallels to experiences of demonization. I'm not suggesting demonization doesn't happen or is purely secular but I do think that a mixture of actual exegesis and "some" social science can help overcompensate for the excesses I saw in my Pentecostal days.
ReplyDeleteTangential to all of that, I would like to belatedly agree with Steves that reading Richard Sibbes is a whole lot more helpful than what I've seen of nouthetic counseling.