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So I've gotten into a bit of discussion/argument in another thread about religion in general and Christianity in general dealing with the concept of alien life, and it's my understanding that most theologians who have considered the idea have decided that there's no problem at all with alien life, they were probably also created by God and have souls. My question is, does anyone have links to the theological arguments to that end, if any do indeed exist?
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Apr 27, 2017 13:15
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Speaking out of Catholicism, there isn't an official stance vis-a-vis extraterrestrials, but there has been speculation on the part of individual clergy. Fr Jose Gabriel Funes at the Vatican Observatory did an interview with L'Osservatore Romano on this topic, official link here and English translation here . Another argument I've read (and I'll look for the original source) is that just as Christ came to humankind in the particular form of a 1st century Jew, part of a culture that would have seemed alien to a 1st century Roman, so Christ comes to the cosmos --and all fallen creatures within it-- in the particular form of Homo sapiens, an undoubtedly fallen creature. Fr George Coyne, another astrophysicist, has written about extraterrestrials. In Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life, and the Theological Implications he writes an essay titled "The evolution of intelligent life on earth and possibly elsewhere: reflections from a religious tradition. You can read the essay here. A key excerpt which has been quoted by other commentators reads: quote:“How could he be God and leave extra-terrestrials in their sin? After all, he was good to us. Why should he not be good to them? God chose a very specific way to redeem human beings. He sent his only Son, Jesus, to them and Jesus gave up his life so that human beings would be saved from their sin. Did God do this for extra-terrestrials? Or did he chose another way to redeem extraterrestrials? The theological implications about God are getting ever more serious. Surely God is completely free to chose his methods. He certainly did not have to send his Son to us. Br Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit who is also an astrophysicist and director of the Observatory, wrote a book (which I have not read), Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?: …and Other Questions from the Astronomers’ In-box at the Vatican Observatory. He has given a couple of interviews in which he discusses the possibility and implications of extraterrestrial life. He also stated that he thinks it is likely we will never encounter them, but that any intelligent creature should likely be able to be baptised. Links here and here. Authors (Christian and non) have explored the problem, most famously C.S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy. A recent book by Michael Faber, The Book of Strange New Things (now with a pilot for an Amazon original series called Oasis) depicts a married Protestant pastor on a mission to minister Christianity to a population of strange humanoids on an extrasolar planet. e:broken links fixed B. Birdsworth fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Apr 27, 2017 |
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Apr 27, 2017 16:53
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At this point in my life I'd be a lot more favorably inclined to "gently caress it all go live in the woods" if it wasn't being proposed by the people that caused me to want that
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Apr 27, 2017 18:15
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Can't wait for Chapo to get on that article! Also, we Catholics will probably baptize the first alien who wants it, and we'll write so many new and exciting rules about baptising aliens.
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Apr 27, 2017 20:30
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JcDent posted:Can't wait for Chapo to get on that article!
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Apr 27, 2017 20:51
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people have been wanting to talk about aliens since around vatican ii so i would say it is very much dreamed of at this point
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Apr 27, 2017 20:53
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Personally I don't really think there's much of a point to it beyond pure speculative sci-fi stuff until we actually know what if anything is out there
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Apr 27, 2017 20:58
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Senju Kannon posted:people have been wanting to talk about aliens since around vatican ii so i would say it is very much dreamed of at this point
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Apr 27, 2017 21:07
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if you think there aren't people who have an alien baptism rubric all written out ready to deploy i don't know what to tell you
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Apr 27, 2017 21:07
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I don't remember if it was in the old thread or in this one, but sometime back I posted a link to a 17th century English translation of Ludovico Sinistrari's De Daemonialite, where the author (a Franciscan friar) posits that non-human sentients beings like centaurs and fauns might not only exist, but would have been endowed by God with an immortal soul and could therefore be baptised and inducted into the Christian faith if they even haven't been already. Apparently some 20th century authors have taken it as a possible blueprint for the baptism of sentient extraterrestrials (I'm seeing mostly cranks though who seem to think that Sinistrari's accounts of incubi and succubi must totally have been aliens coming to bone human women, and admittedly this whole question was only of passing concern to Sinistrari). You can find the translation here. I think this would be the most important part for the alien question: p. 119-121 posted:61. Seventh question: Would those animals be born in original sin, and have been redeemed by the Lord Christ? Would the grace have been conferred upon them and through what sacraments? Under what law would they live, and would they be capable of beatitude and damnation?
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Apr 27, 2017 21:09
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oh yeah plenty of people have them ready but they also probably don't have the same ones ready, so it'll involve decades if not centuries of canonical and theological arguments and omfg it's going to be so much fun
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Apr 27, 2017 21:10
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Wait, why would a centaur need salvation, wouldn't he need to be descended from Adam to -- ADAM NO
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Apr 27, 2017 21:22
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In this universe there may exist rational life in need of salvation... but we haven't found it yet. 
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Apr 27, 2017 21:25
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did we already talk about robots wanting baptism in this thread because i wonder about robots who may want baptism (though clearly they should instead recite the nembutsu or whatever)
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Apr 27, 2017 21:27
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Senju Kannon posted:did we already talk about robots wanting baptism in this thread because i wonder about robots who may want baptism (though clearly they should instead recite the nembutsu or whatever) There was definitely some chat about how a computer could take the Eucharist. I'm not sure about baptism.
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Apr 27, 2017 21:30
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:There was definitely some chat about how a computer could take the Eucharist. I'm not sure about baptism. That would probably be a short sacrament.
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Apr 27, 2017 21:39
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wet your finger with holy water and inscribe a cross on the outside of the case
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Apr 27, 2017 22:02
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if you have to reboot it does it need to be baptized again
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Apr 27, 2017 22:11
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is a baptismal program platform-specific? i hear windows baptisms are just ridden with font overflows
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Apr 27, 2017 22:17
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cis autodrag posted:is a baptismal program platform-specific? i hear windows baptisms are just ridden with font overflows  Senju Kannon posted:if you have to reboot it does it need to be baptized again Technically that's one of the open questions in theology. Or like, if we decide that a sentient AI has a soul because it's capable of rational thinking, what happens when you turn it off and then later turn it back on again. If it's the same soul then where in the world was it in the mean-time. If it's a different soul then you basically just fuckin' murdered someone.
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Apr 27, 2017 22:39
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The Phlegmatist posted:
What happens to the human soul while the dude is in a coma? How about if he wakes up with serious amnesia? I suspect in Catholicism a soul is inherently tied to the body, not consciousness or identity (you wouldn't multi-baptize a person with DPD, even assuming it's legit). So either a software can't have a soul at all, or it gets baptized once and that's it. What if we start baptizing aliens who reproduce asexually, like bacteria? Will both parts need a new baptism after they split? If not, which one does?
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Apr 28, 2017 05:05
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James Blish wrote a novel (A Case of Conscience) about aliens who appear to be unfallen, and there's a brief preface explaining the premise. Sadly I can't remember the specifics or if he touched on them being able to be baptised.
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Apr 28, 2017 10:15
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Is it me, or are AIs the new way of copping out of discussions lately? Not pertaining to this thread, actually, I just participated in a debate where a feminist author asked to comment on the transphobia exhibited by her organization said we were silly and that she had more important stuff on her plate. Said stuff? An article on preventing sexism in robots.
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Apr 28, 2017 10:37
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Bel_Canto posted:So everybody's not-so-favorite public convert to Orthodoxy just got profiled in The New Yorker along with his weirdo Benedict Option book. Honestly all I'm gleaning from this profile is that the dude's got a massive pile of childhood issues that seem to have metastasized into a fetish for rural life and cultural homogeneity and a pathological obsession with how the nasty gays are out to get him. quote:Dreher left Catholicism in 2006; after covering the Catholic sex-abuse scandal for the Post and The American Conservative, he found it impossible to go to church without feeling angry. He and his wife converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and, with a few other families, opened their own Orthodox mission church, near St. Francisville, sending away for a priest. It was Dreher’s Orthodox priest, Father Matthew, who laid down the law. “He said, ‘You have no choice as a Christian: you’ve got to love your dad even if he doesn’t love you back in the way that you want him to,’ ” Dreher recalled. “ ‘You cannot stand on justice: love matters more than justice, because the higher justice is love.’ ” When Dreher struggled to master his feelings, Father Matthew told him to perform a demanding Orthodox ritual called the Optina Rule. He recited the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—hundreds of times a day. That part's pretty good.
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Apr 28, 2017 12:05
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 Should've gotten some eyeglasses instead, smh
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Apr 28, 2017 15:51
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he's tiny you bitch
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Apr 28, 2017 15:53
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Tias posted:Is it me, or are AIs the new way of copping out of discussions lately? Not pertaining to this thread, actually, I just participated in a debate where a feminist author asked to comment on the transphobia exhibited by her organization said we were silly and that she had more important stuff on her plate. Said stuff? An article on preventing sexism in robots. It's always the most fun to talk about edge cases, and robots are safely removed from the real world. Do severely disabled human beings have human rights? Ohh boy. Do robots? This one's more fun to discuss. Although I guess automation of cognitive tasks is one of the less absurd things futurists worry about.
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Apr 28, 2017 16:49
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of course disabled people have rights what kind of monster feels the need to debate that
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Apr 28, 2017 17:51
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i can think of at least one senior professor at princeton, lol. oh wait peter singer actually is a monster
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Apr 28, 2017 18:21
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Senju Kannon posted:of course disabled people have rights what kind of monster feels the need to debate that you should know all about the types of people who will argue against the rights of other humans  they're called
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Apr 28, 2017 19:41
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cis autodrag posted:you should know all about the types of people who will argue against the rights of other humans On the other hand, Evangelicals living in the southern part of the US did tend to consider that in a case of a man hoping to remarry, and a woman whose reactions to outside stimuli were minimal, their sympathies should be with the person unable to verbalize a need for water, not the other one. It's almost as though there's many possible groups that some people consider less than human, and most people are only monstrous towards some of those groups, not all of them at once. Additionally, with robots, it's safe to ponder the implications, because while I might become (severely) disabled, or encounter misogyny, or experience anti-religious violence, I am not a robot and thus I don't have to worry "but what if it were me". (It's also interesting to see people's starting assumptions - whether they think of robots as likely to be resentful, or smothering caretakers, or insatiably curious, or whatever.)
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Apr 28, 2017 20:30
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i think robots will be bros who can hang and will otherwise just be mechanical no need to kill all human we tight
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Apr 28, 2017 20:47
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cis autodrag posted:you should know all about the types of people who will argue against the rights of other humans The people I was thinking of are a part of the animal rights movement, and would probably consider themselves nonreligious. They argue that what we think of as human rights should be awarded explicitly on the basis of higher cognitive function and this should apply to many animals, but not to some humans (fetuses, severely cognitively impaired people, coma patients with little hope of waking up, ...)
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Apr 28, 2017 20:51
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pidan posted:The people I was thinking of are a part of the animal rights movement, and would probably consider themselves nonreligious. They argue that what we think of as human rights should be awarded explicitly on the basis of higher cognitive function and this should apply to many animals, but not to some humans (fetuses, severely cognitively impaired people, coma patients with little hope of waking up, ...) see i agree with the first part but not the second. dolphins, whales, and some varieties of apes clearly have structured societies and sense of identity and it's wrong to deprive them of life. my philosophy degree tells me that lots of people are willing to debate this hard, but i think anyone who is willing to say that protecting those animals' rights is even more important than protecting disabled people's rights is a little monstrous. and my dig at southern evangelicals is coming from my perspective as a queer woman mr zonohedron mc contrarypants :P
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Apr 28, 2017 20:55
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cis autodrag posted:see i agree with the first part but not the second. dolphins, whales, and some varieties of apes clearly have structured societies and sense of identity and it's wrong to deprive them of life. my philosophy degree tells me that lots of people are willing to debate this hard, but i think anyone who is willing to say that protecting those animals' rights is even more important than protecting disabled people's rights is a little monstrous. I'm proud to be a daughter of the McContrarypants family, but I wasn't just being contrary; I did mean it when I said that most people are only monstrous towards some groups they're not in, not towards all of them. The people who think someone with a disability is less human probably don't think that being non-Christian makes someone less human; the people who think the poor should just pray more might... okay they're probably monstrous towards everyone, but maybe they're not; and so on and so on.
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Apr 28, 2017 21:03
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Senju Kannon posted:i think robots will be bros who can hang and will otherwise just be mechanical all intelligences are beautiful (meanwhile, despite the assertion that "what christ did not adopt he did not sanctify," i still think that he had to have come for parrots as well. African Greys, man)
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Apr 28, 2017 21:13
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HEY GAIL posted:yeah same I tried to talk about the place of animals in Christian moral systems once itt but no-one wanted to go along  From what I've read elsewhere the general Christian position is that animals either are just somehow part of the inanimate world, or they have some kind of special souls that either aren't immortal or all go to heaven, but either way salvation doesn't apply to them. There is a Christian wing to the animal rights scene here, but I've literally never heard it brought up in church and I had to look pretty hard before I found anything about it in mainstream Christian publications. Also Christians invented factory farming.
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Apr 28, 2017 21:24
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i would argue capitalism created corporate farming, but then protestants DID create capitalism so... _(:3」z)_
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Apr 28, 2017 21:35
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Senju Kannon posted:_(:3」z)_ okay maybe it's because I'm drunk rn but I cannot make heads nor tails from this smiley (emoticon? emoji? Is there even a difference?), what's it supposed to signify?
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Apr 28, 2017 22:16
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lying down
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Apr 28, 2017 22:22
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