In a manner of speaking, yes, but you know that is not what we ordinarily use the term “extraterrestrial” for. You might as well say that if God has no physical form, then He has no spine, therefore He is an invertebrate; but again, that doesn’t really convey a helpful mental image.
Fortunately that’s easily refuted. Simply provide one counterexample - a UFO crewman who is neither a demon nor a Satanic creation - and the whole silly argument is banished to where the woodbine twineth.
Unfortunately, the literature isn’t very hopeful- we’ve got The New Agey Nordics of the Contactees & the Grays of the Abductees… either the “Angels of Light with another Gospel” or the “Serpent Seed”.
To be halfway serious, it was the non-religious Ufologist John Keel (“Mothman Prophecies”) who said that studying accounts of 20th-century Ufo encounters was very similar to studying accounts of medieval demonology.
No, it actually is quite the opposite. In Revelation 12 we see the angel which we may call ‘Mother Earth’ giving birth to the ‘male child’, the body of Christ, us, God’s children conformed to the likeness of Jesus. Angels are stars (Rev 1:20), God’s entire system is based on fertility and children, much talk is about fertility and barrenness, referring to the wombs of women and to the land.
The word alien is also used many times also, normally assumed to mean not in their home land, but could be taken as ET’s.
My own belief, by revelation and visions, is that we were meant to be children of angels, those angels are children of arch angels, etc. The womb of our real mother is the earth, her heart the sun, and we were meant to have children, such as mother earth has us. But the system was broken by Satan through Adam and Eve and we now are just children having children, this is why childbirth is so painful.
Satan has effectively isolated us apart from God and our mother. Jesus came to put all things back.
I was taught that God created main in his own “image” the way a sculptor creates a statue in the “image” he sees for IT. It doesn’t mean we look like God does.
Of course, that school of thought probably was the reason for the edit which added “…and likeness…” Just like “Thou shalt not KILL” was changed to Thou shalt not MURDER" because we really like to kill people and needed a loophole.
As many as may be accounted for by how good was the translation team in its respective age and time. “Young Girl” v. “Virgin”; “Sea of Reeds” v. “Red Sea”; etc. If we wanted to be 100% sure we could always learn Ancient Hebrew and Koiné Greek. IIRC, the original text of the commandments WAS supposed to translate better to “thou shalt not murder” (notice the same scroll *does proceed to prescribe “justified” killing *in quite a few cases).
As far as aliens, SOME schools of thought are along the lines that if the Bible does not mention it, then it just can’t be real or if real can’t be godly. Some others (e.g. the Catholic tradition, as mentioned upthread) that if the Bible neither mentions nor sanctions every single last object, idea, process, phenomenon, force or perception in the universe, then whether something you come across that is not explicitly mentioned there is real or godly you have to figure out by dealing with it as it turns out to be. (Why do I get the feeling that if the aliens wanted to eat us, the Holy See would declare that a sign they’re not quite spiritually enlightened and that Catholics may press the firing buttons on the nukes with a clean conscience…)
The book Do They Keep Kosher On Mars? by Sol The Answer Man addresses this very question (along with many others). After consulting with a few rabbis, sol comes to the answer that nothing in the Talmud rules out extraterrestrial life. However, the rabbis say that they would expect G-d to have revealed Himself to these aliens as well and given them His commandments. So we should be on the look out for little green men who wear yarmulkes and keep kosher.
This passage is occasionally interpreted to be about aliens and a UFO:
“And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man.” -Ezekiel 1:4-5
I’m not specifically talking about aliens dropping in on Earth. But the universe holds not just billions of stars - there are literally billions of billions of stars out there. It seems that if God made the universe, he was wasting most of his creation if we’re the only place he created life.
It’s linen. That aside, even if you don’t understand the relevance of that particular commandment, and even if nobody did, what clothes we wear is part of our lives, while extraterrestrials too distant for us to contact are not.
Ironically, modern Western laws and ethics - to which atheists might or might not adhere, to the same individual extend as religious folks do to Biblical laws - are in large part based on the Bible.
I tend to disagree. Everything we know about the universe, its vastness, complexity etc. is part of our reality in that we can perceive it. The whole point (or at least one major point) in creating something that elaborate could very well be to point out that God has no need to be economical; that it makes no difference to Him whether He creates just a single planet or myriads of galaxies to host just one intelligent species. In the words of Psalm 19:2, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork.”
Precisely. Contrary to what some people claim, Biblical Hebrew does have different terms for different instances of killing. The one used in this commandment means pretty much the same as the English “murder”, as opposed to killing in war, as legal punishment, in self-defense, or the killing of animals.
Fortunately for those concerned about mistranslations, there is still the original Hebrew text, as well as people who understand it.
Nonsense. “Modern Western laws and ethics” are in large part a rejection of the Bible. Equality between the sexes, refraining from genocide, religious tolerance, tolerance of homosexuality, separation of church and state; the outlawing of slavery, freedom of speech and democracy; all are directly in opposition to the Bible, and amount to a long war against Christianity. If you are referring to rules against such things as murder and theft those are hardly especially Christian; non-Christian societies came up with those prohibitions long before Christianity was imagined.
That just makes it an example of egomania on top of being wasteful.
The cosmology of the authors of the Bible does contain worlds other than this one. You have the Earth and the Heavens, and that’s it; the Heavens are understood to be a broad space surrounding Earth (and a flat earth at that), but it’s not Space as we understand it that contains other lands or oceans or worlds within other firmaments. Stars are light points; they are not suns for other worlds.
Therefore the Biblical concept of “extra-terrestial” includes only Heavenly beings whose domain, so to speak, is still essentially related to this (single) Heaven surrounding this (single) Earth.
You’re dismissing the plain fact that Europe (and consequently, its cultural “descendants” like the US) with its ethical and legal systems used to be ruled by christianity for a pretty long time. That influence has never been eliminated, just modified.
That other cultures have come up with similar basic concepts only means that they are to some extend “inbuilt”. In other words, they simply make sense.
So, to get back to what I originally responded to, atheists have access to rules against being “aggressive and mean” both by means of commonsense and, in greater detail, through the Judeo-Christian history of Western culture.
How do you define waste, and how does that relate to creation ex nihilo? As for “egomania”, I’d say if you created a universe, and conscious beings, for whatever purpose, it’s sort of ok to let them know that you’re more powerful than they, and that you wish them to please follow some rules in exchange for their existence.
By your definition, Soviet Russia’s rules and laws were also largely based on the Bible, since Russia was ruled by Christianity for a long time. And Europe’s laws and ethics are also evidently based on Mithraic mysteries and the Roman pantheon, since… yeah.
The Judeo-Christian history of Western culture is full of massacres, petty horrors, divine rights of tyrants, burnings of heretics, torture of Jews, and so on and so forth. The Church, as you say, lorded over Europe for a long, long time. During that time, Europe was a cesspool of ignorance, injustice and brutality. You want a taste of how it was like, Saudi Arabia is a close match.
Modern ethics mostly come from the writings of humanist philosophers like Kant, Hume, Bentham or Voltaire who were for the most part opposed to, and sometimes violently repressed by, the Church ; and modern laws are derived from them.