You can't reason people out of a belief that they didn't reason themselves into. -Unknown

There is no such thing as bad news for religious belief. It's a shortcut to explain the unknown, and there will always be the unknowable. The number of followers of the one true God may dwindle, certainly, but people will always find something without evidence to believe in with religious fervor. Such as the fact that they aren't human or Barack Obama is an African born terrorist pushing a secret Black agenda.

As for other Earth-like planets and life on them; people continually fail to consider the expanse of time and how the expanse of human history (or even all life on Earth) is merely a blip. Our extinction event may be just over the horizon for all we know. To expect our blip to line up with another civilization's blip and for us to recognize each other across the vastness of space with the physical limitations and the universal constants as we understand them is to expect an ant on a soap bubble in your backyard to communicate with an ant on a soap bubble in my backyard before they pop the bubbles under their own weight. I'm not sure how the ants got on the soap bubbles to begin with though, so let's not study that analogy too hard. As far as we know, life is unique. The conditions it started with here on Earth may not guarantee life if replicated a million times. If/when we actually make some of our own we may know what we're looking for.

Which brings me back to God. A theoretical being with the power to travel to Earth and create life obviously has an understanding far beyond ours of the physical laws of time and space.* To expect him to communicate with us in a very literal sense would be like me sitting down with my dog and having a discussion about why I would like her to stop shitting on the carpet right after she came in from outside, including my frustrations with how I don't have the time to deal with it when we have to be leaving for my daughter's softball practice in the next 20 minutes and I still have to make sure that my son gets his feet cleaned off since he stepped in it while switching Disney Infinity figures. She doesn't understand a bit of that. But she does understand, BAD DOG! and scowl.

Point being, this is the view many Christians have of their God. He provides a general guideline that was translated by man, and any inconsistencies are explained away by translations and allegory. Sure, there are hard literalists, but even they pick and choose as we all well know.

As for me, I don't believe nothin' what ain't got no compellin' evidence.

* True story. I woke up at 3:39 one morning about a year ago with a very firm grasp on the concept of spacetime and how everything works, including the immutability of the universal constant and what any workarounds to it would require. Mind you, I hadn't done any hard reading on this stuff recently or in anywhere near the detail that my understanding was now at, but my mind was putting together all the disparate facts in my head and giving me this understanding as an output. That understanding stuck with me for most of the day, and I tried to relate it to a few other people close to me through rough graphs, but I found that I needed more axis than could be plotted in 4 dimensions in order to illustrate my thoughts. I woke up the next morning and the immutability of the universal constant remained but everything else is a fuzzy recollection and the graphs I drew the previous day puzzled me to no end (I discarded them in embarrassment). I still wonder how valid my line of thought that day was, and what brought it about. I imagine people that have claimed divine inspiration had similar episodes that they didn't try to ground in hard science.

By the way, great commentary here. Any chance you'd let me post it as a guest post on magazine of the dead (which seems to have morphed into a place where I, and eventually hopefully others, can rant politics, culture and anything)? Just a thought

Thanks for the compliment and request, but I prefer to keep my Vent at Vent. It's the neighborhood bar of my internet.

cool