Spiritual notions centred on UFOs aren't always much further outside rational comprehension than are mainstream religious beliefs. The night sky affords visible affirmation of the infinity within which our minuscule existences operate. The possibility of extraterrestrial life somewhere in the vast universe doesn't violate ordinary logic. And in an era when technology is a god, it follows that a form of divinity may be conferred on some imagined, distant species of great technological advancement.Throughout decades of claimed UFO sightings and alien encounters, a modest number of fervent people have responded this way. Canadian photojournalist Douglas Curran once spent years driving around North America to meet them, the effort resulting in a 1985 book called In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space.Under a predictably vivid quilting of eccentricity, the rural Alberta gas-station operators and California retirees who had built flying saucers in their backyards evinced an unexpected kind of poignancy. While humans were poised to destroy themselves with their atom bombs, they believed, wiser alien brothers had harnessed technology to better ends, and these space creatures -- Jesus was often perceived as one of them -- represented hope.Is science fiction as a religion more fantastic than, say, the Judeo-Christian mythos? Lacking the weight of history or broad acceptance, it's certainly easier to ridicule. More to the point, its "prophets" are our entirely visible contemporaries, and its cultish excesses and hypocrisies are subject to present-day showcasing. Nascent Judaism and Christianity endured cataclysms, but it's unclear they could have survived CNN.Which brings us to a Quebec-centred UFO group and its leader Rael, the self-proclaimed son of an extraterrestrial named Yahweh and half-brother to Jesus, Moses and Buddha. There's little poignancy here, except perhaps for followers who lost marriages and custody of their children as the price of membership, or the young women who are proscribed from physical intimacy with anyone but Rael (and the extraterrestrials who created the human race via cloning).
View: Full Article | Source: The Globe and Mail
Thats the first thought that came to me when i read this.
