It is a pretty straight-forward extrapolation. It seems evident to me that most animal life have some degree of self-awareness, which correlates to the survival instinct. Humans developed abstract intellect through the various mechanisms the combined to support it, a big one being complex language. Once an entity can grasp concepts like “three” and “next week”, the self-awareness becomes a subject of abstract analysis: what happens when our bodies fail? The most comfortable answer is continued existence of some sort of spirit entity, at which point, it is child’s play to extrapolate/imagine/invent a universe seething with the spirits of formerly-living beings. And because our social tendency is apparently to align hierarchically, naturally there must be a similar structure to the spirit world, with some sort of imperial spirit governing the lesser spirits, perhaps with an intermediate spirit peerage.
If aliens develop along different social lines, their emotional and metaphysical perceptions/theories are likely to be different. For instance, egg-layers who are not wired for nurturing young will have a wholly different affection profile: Og, you know, loves us, that is pretty important. If the love thing forms a different context, the need for a caring deity might be lost, at which point, the deity would be seen as trivial and remote.
It is hard to imagine things vastly different from what we are familiar with. Which may explain why we are so far short of discovering a means for meta-relativistic interstellar travel.
No it isn’t. It’s derived from a particular family of religions, not some natural conclusion. The majority of religions have been polytheistic or simply lacking in gods; monotheism isn’t some natural inevitable idea, not even of humans much less aliens. If some asteroid had fallen on the early Jews, it’s entirely possible the idea of a single “God” would never have reoccurred.
All of that presupposes a human psychology, not an alien one. And not even all humans came to that conclusion, nor is what you describe even a monotheism; there’s no “God” there.
I don’t quite agree with the notion that someone ‘unbiased’ could not be human.
In fact I would say that a lot of atheists are atheists either because they grew up without religion and conclude that the evidence for gods isn’t compelling or exactly because they *overcame * the bias from their religious upbringing.
I don’t see why someone should be 100% unknowledgable about religion to count as ‘unbiased’.
Going back to the OP here, even beginning to judge this requires an enormous and unusual knowledge of comparative religion. Even then, you couldn’t answer for many of the religions because there isn’t enough recent polling data of adherents to know what they think today. However, in the college dorm spirit of opining on the un-opinable: Most adult religious adherents do not “believe that ‘their views’ are correct and everyone else is wrong.”
Now, fundamentalists do believe “their views are correct and everyone else is wrong.” So do many non-fundamentalist evangelical Christians. So do many Orthodox Jews. So do atheists, almost by definition, since otherwise they’d say they are agnostics.
In the United States, we have a situation in which theologically liberal religious sects in Christianity, and perhaps Judaism as well, are in relative decline. But that’s local, and I hope temporary. This trend mirrors, in the religious realm, the political polarization caused by the Great Sort.
Not very convincing, it’s a fundamental tenet of every religion that it reveals the truth of existence. Even religions that stem from the same background emphasize their differences, which may seem minute to an outsider. More open-minded individuals may try to stress common beliefs, most people do not. People slaughtering each other over sectarian differences defines our history as a species.
Our concept of God comes from being at the mercy of a universe that we can’t understand yet, so we made up stuff that “explained” it to make us feel better about our existential situation. If alien life evolved similar to the way we did, they would end up, like we did, with a mind that can perceive the universe but not yet comprehend it. Therefore, God.
No; our concept of “God” comes from the Abrahamic religions. It’s by no means a natural conclusion even for humans, as demonstrated by the fact that that isn’t what most cultures concluded.
And it has been used to spread terror, hatred and guilt far more often than to make people feel comfortable.
After re-thinking the subject, I’m inclined to say, Yes, aliens would think us delusional for believing in God, but assuming they would have had the same psychological need to delude themselves at some point in their evolution, they would recognize that need in us and understand it. But it’s still delusional.
You’re being more specific than I am. By “concept of God”, I mean the psychological need to invent an entity that “explains” the universe and our place in it. That entity could be the Abrahamic God, or Zeuss, or animist spirits, or whatever “god” aliens would come up with.
The political application of religion to manipulate people certainly has blood on its hands, but the same could be said of the political application of other things like technology. Aliens would probably note our aggressive tendencies in general, not just religion-based violence.
As I mentioned I know that I posit all this from a biased perspective. I tried to make the scenario simplified in that most (all) of us have been predisposed to religion of some sort, so what would a true outsider think if “they” were able to view our actions based on religions, the various and multiple religions, the presumed circumstantial evidence from each and the lack of any empirical evidence after thousands of years.
Given all the above, why would an outsider think a belief in any supreme being as being any different than a belief in Unicorns or tooth fairies? (hence the delusional comment… and I say this with respect not trying to offend those that believe).
Back when I was young and very religious (I seriously looked into become a Catholic priest) I had come to the conclusion that most people, even the ones that went to church, didn’t REALLY believe in God.
Their behavior was not consistent with belief in God. If they REALLY believed in heaven and hell they would take much better stock of their behavior.
Now that I am pretty much an atheist, I look back on myself coming to that conclusion and realize I wasn’t completely dumb and that time
I think that is why many religiouspeople get so upset at atheists. They know there is no God but are trying to delude themselves. Being confronted with an atheist makes them realize their doubt and they overcompensate by over-reacting. If they truely believed in God they wouldn’t be upset but more pity the athiest.
Every religion? How many have you studied? What about the Bahá’í Faith? Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement? The Jains?
Small religions? I mention them because the larger religions have many sects, some of which tend to teach we’re right and you’re wrong, and some of which do not.
If your case against religion was strong, you wouldn’t have to argue that fundamentalism (which is pretty much unknown in my liberal neighborhood) is the ideal type for all religion.
With all due respect, virtually no one has such a broad knowledge of history to make this kind of statement.
Now, if you said that people slaughtering each other over sectarian differences defines Europe between 1618 and 1648, I would agree. But the Peace of Westphalia was actually pretty effective. European wars since then have not primarily been wars of religion.
