CdesignProponentsist wrote:It's basically Scientology, with nicer aliens.

laklak wrote:Pangaea split up and caused Teh Flud? They have a slight problem with tectonic time scales, don't they?

As humanity’s understanding of the universe evolves, our religious beliefs change along with it, and the result is that every new religion bears the stamp of the time and place in which it first arose. Mormonism is an example – Joseph Smith used “seer stones” to translate the Book of Mormon, and claimed that the Native Americans were descendants of ancient Hebrew tribes, at a time in American history when both those ideas were in vogue.

Interestingly, Raelism officially describes itself as an atheist religion, in the sense that it does not demand belief in supernatural beings. That said, in every other respect, it exactly resembles traditional religion, right down to miracles (done with advanced alien technology – for instance, Raelians believe that a “repulsion beam” parted the sea so that the Israelites could cross it), prayer (which is explained to put one in telepathic communication with the Elohim), and life after death (Rael claims the Elohim can recreate an entire person, including personality and memory, from a single cell of their body, and that they have already done so for several thousand people who were taken to their home planet – they also plan to recreate the wicked, so that they can be punished as they deserve). And just like all other religions, Raelism’s gods are systematically immune to disproof: they refuse to reveal themselves to humanity until we obey Rael’s wishes to build an “embassy” for them.

The Raelians are also enthusiastic about intelligent design, for obvious reasons, and denounce evolution as “a myth”.

R.L.Dione’s God Drives a Flying Saucer (Corgi, 1973; 1st ed. 1969) sneers at traditional metaphysics: “… no system of logic yet devised can resolve the inconsistencies and paradoxes inherent in the belief that man is inhabited by a mystical, supernatural and immortal something called a soul.”

Turning to the Bible, what is to be made of the miracles recorded there? Dione can find no reason to doubt the Bible’s accuracy: “…if it were not for the references to miracles, the Bible would stand unchallenged as a monumental achievement in historical reporting.”

The possibility of supernatural powers he finds absurd, therefore the only explanation is that flying saucer technology was at work. After that, everything becomes simple: Adam and Eve were created by genetic engineers working under the direction of God, who is the “leader of the master technologists”; angels were spacemen; Ezekiel’s vision was of flying saucers; as to the Immaculate Conception, it is “reasonably certain” that Gabriel was a “biological specialist” who artificially inseminated Mary with a hypodermic needle; and “it may well be that the sperm used was God’s making Jesus the Son of God just as the Bible teaches.”

Yet in the end Dione’s super-technological God is hardly different from the supernatural one of the Catholics. We don’t have souls, but technology can make our minds, which are electromagnetic in nature, immortal: “God will choose which of us will survive as angels in heaven … by analysing the references of our guardian angels and by studying the monitoring tapes which are at this moment recording our lives.”

About eighteen million years ago, say the strange and ancient legends of our little planet, at a time when Mars, Venus and Earth were in close conjunction, along a magnetic path so formed came a huge, shining, radiant vessel of dazzling power and beauty, bringing to earth ‘thrice thirty-five’ human beings, of perfection beyond our highest ideals; gods rather than men; divine kings of archaic memory, under whose benign world-government a shambling, hermaphrodite monster was evolved into thinking, sexual man.

The traditional ancient astronaut nonsense of Erich von Däniken, Robert Temple, and Zecharia Sitchin falls into the “scientific” category since they intended—however imperfectly—to use facts and evidence to propose a hypothesis meant to be evaluated for truth. By contrast, Scientology, the Raëlians, and the Christian UFO ministers of the 1950s and ’60s considered the ancient astronaut idea to be an article of faith, a group of spiritual beings in flying machines meant as a replacement mythology.