The Truth (About Religion's Future) is Out There

In her 2010 book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, journalist Leslie Kean makes, amongst others, the following two assertions:

• “There exists in our skies, worldwide, a solid, physical phenomenon that appears to be under intelligent control and is capable of speeds, maneuverability, and luminosity beyond current known technology.”

• “The hypothesis that UFOs are of extraterrestrial or interdimensional origin is a rational one and must be taken into account, given the data we have. However, the actual origin and nature of UFOs have not yet been determined by scientists, and remain unknown.”

Having recently happened onto the topic of UFOs due to the interest of a friend who mentioned it in passing, I don’t have a particular horse in this race. In fact, I come to the subject with the skepticism typical of my (middle class, college educated, faith in science) demographic. Nevertheless, I find Kean’s arguments in favor of her assertions convincing, to the point where I have shifted from my default skepticism to what I would describe as a welcoming agnosticism; if there are indeed ETs about, mi casa, su casa. (Kean and her co-authors - her book includes several – endorse a “miltant agnosticism” re: UFOs, i.e. “no position on whether UFOs are extraterrestrial should be taken until they have been systematically studied” in a “public and strategic” fashion, the latter piece accounting for the “militant” element. I suppose writing about UFOs on this blog makes me a contributor, however small, to this militant agnosticism, but as an Episcopalian- official slogan: “The Episcopal Church welcomes you,”- and a pacifist, “welcoming agnosticism” is more my style.)

If you have even a sliver of an open mind about UFOs, Kean’s book is highly recommended. She presents reams of firsthand accounts, frequently supported by objective, tangible evidence (e.g. radar records, radiation readings, multiple credible witnesses, and, occasionally, non-doctored photographs) which support her assertion that roughly 5% of all (reported) UFO sightings cannot be explained by known earthly phenomena. Kean has put all of the pertinent information into one lucid source, and I leave it to you to consider the evidence and place yourself along the continuum from skepticism to agnosticism to true belief.

If you place yourself anywhere on the continuum outside of absolute, unbending skepticism, two further questions are starving for attention. The first question has to do with the origins of the UFO taboo that underwrites my demographic’s default skepticism, and is addressed directly in Kean’s book. Kean’s co-authors Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, both mainstream American academics at Big 10 Universities, describe the taboo thusly:

“There is a tabbo on this book- the UFO taboo. Not in popular culture, of course, where interest in UFOs abounds and websites proliferate, but in elite culture- the structure of authoritative belief and practice that determines what ‘reality’ officially is. With respect to UFO phenomena this structure is dominated globally by three groups: governments, the scientific community, and the mainstream media. Although their individual members may have varying private beliefs about UFOs, in public these groups share the official view that UFOs are not ‘real’ and should not be taken seriously- or at least no more seriously than any other cultural belief.”

It is tempting to stop there, with the insight that anyone who wishes to be taken seriously has more than sufficient reason to never question their officially sanctioned default skepticism. But Wendt and Duvall take their analysis deeper, answering the question that always cries out for an answer: who benefits from the official reality? Their answer is far from surprising:

“Our thesis is that the origins of this taboo are political. As political scientists, we are concerned with a possible connection between the need to dismiss the UFO and the way in which modern peoples organize and govern their societies. The inability to see clearly and talk rationally about UFOs seems to be a symptom of authoritative anxiety, a socially subconscious fear of what the reality of the UFO might mean for modern government.”

Wendt and Duvall argue that it might mean three very specific things. First, it would establish the existence of a vastly superior Other, unmasking the State as impotent in the face of a potentially overwhelming threat. Secondly, it would likely foment a demand for a world government best equipped to face the threat, dissolving the sovereign territorial states that are currently doing their very best to maintain the taboo. Finally, and most interestingly, Wendt and Duvall maintain that “the extraterrestrial possibility calls into question what we call the anthropocentric nature of modern sovereignty. By this we mean that, in the modern world, political organization everywhere is based on the assumption that only human beings have the ability and authority to govern and determine our collective fate.” Once this assumption is undermined, as certainly the vastly superior intelligence and technology of extraterrestrial “visitors” (had to throw in a V reference, natch) makes them more qualified to govern than Jesse Helms ever was, Wendt and Duvall hold that the following question would become unavoidable: “To whom would people give their loyalty in such a situation, and could states in their present form survive were such a question politically salient?” (As to conspiracy theories, Wendt and Duvall go on to say that “far from hiding the truth about aliens the state is more likely hiding its ignorance.” Being the nation state with the most power to lose per the three scenarios above, the United States, of course, has the greatest incentive to maintain its ignorance via enforcing the taboo, and Kean highlights several such instances over the course of the book.)

As an undergraduate poli sci major, I find all of this fascinating. (Spok reference: check.) But as a human being, Wendt and Duvall’s third existential political threat directs us toward a similar question I find even more intriguing. If extraterrestrials were openly acknowledged and/or plain for everyone to see, would people continue to maintain their religious loyalty in such a situation, and could religions in their present form survive? Kean points out that the authentication of UFOs puts science, which currently sits at the right hand of the government, at equal risk with its political godfather: “UFOs demonstrate characteristics appearing to contradict the fundamental laws of physics on which our understanding of the universe is based.” In such a scenario, science would match government’s impotence with its own ignorance. Wouldn’t religion, whose stock in trade is every bit as much declaring fundamental laws on which our understanding of the universe is based, look just as ignorant, its dogmas and received truths crumbling in precisely the same fashion as our physicists’ most elegant equations?

Religion’s best hope for sustained relevance in its current form might well be if the ETs were at least a little bit aggressive (too aggressive, of course, and there’d be none of us left to pray), a threatening Other being, perhaps, the sine qua non for religion’s relevance. But UFOs have been as remarkable for their non-aggression, even when being threatened or even fired upon by military warcraft, as they have for their remarkable capabilities. (Alien abduction stories, which tales often seem anything but non-aggressive, are a horse of a different color, and would seem to fail to meet any of the criteria which support UFO sightings as an actual objective phenomena. Kean doesn’t even mention them.) Unless the old story about the chickens who trusted absolutely in the farmer who reliably fed them each and every morning right up until the day the farmer came out with a hatchet instead of a feed bag applies here, it appears that religion would be confronting an Other who is at the very least neutral and could very well turn out to be benevolent. My optimistic (non-chicken farmer) interpretation is that civilizations are unable to survive to the advanced stage of intergalactic travel unless and until they first mature beyond the aggressive tendencies that would doom them well before advancing far enough to master e.g. warp drive. And, if I may be indulged in some even more wildly optimistic speculation, perhaps we are at just such a turning point where we either shed our martial skin and take to the stars or spend a final miserable few centuries confined to our little galactic backwater. And, also perhaps, the UFOs are here, Gene Rodenberry and his Prime Directive be damned, to help us make the great pacific leap in whatever way they can.

Another of Kean’s co-authors and one who actually encountered a UFO in his job as a commercial pilot in Great Britain, Captain Ray Bower, takes the following perspective about what he considers the inevitable public acknowledgment of UFO reality: “I suspect this might turn out to be the time when the human race will grow up. Forced to confront their own smallness in relation to Earth’s place in the universe, humans may at last face up to a future as a tiny fish in a big sea.” Confronted with an advanced benevolent civilization, could religion, at long last, grow up too?
Before attempting to answer this question I would be remiss if I did not point out that my hope for timely and effective extraterrestrial intervention may simply be a secular messianic fantasy, rooted in the fertile soil of the Judeo-Christian tradition in much the same way that Marx’s dialectical materialism was just a coming of the kingdom for the un-churched (or un-templed). But while, to take a Christian angle, we “do not know the day nor the hour,” we certainly know that climate change is accelerating towards the point of no return. (http://qz.com/154196/the-only-way-to-stop-climate-change-now-may-be-revolution/) Leaving us Christians looking more and more like the cop in LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad,” who, in response to Cool J’s overwhelming sheer Badness, panics and says “I think I’m gonna need backup!” Confronted by the existential threat of climate change, we’re calling in the Son of God’s backup quarterback in the form of ET. Which, objective radar data notwithstanding, makes my hope for imminent contact with extraterrestrials as potentially ridiculous as the billboards that touted the end of the world on May 21, 2011.

But, with our shared blogging pleasure in mind, let’s set aside the question of whether I am the one who needs to grow up out of my own childish alien messianic fantasy, and return to the question of whether the data collected and reported by Kean hints at a turning point for religion. This question, surprise, surprise, takes us back yet again to early twentieth century Vienna and one Sigmund Freud. Because if we are to make the case that religion is stuck in a kind of prolonged adolescence, then it is Freud who, still to this day, has done the very best job of diagnosing that arrested development.

In the first blow of a one-two punch achieved across the span of two major works, Freud, in Totem and Tabboo, pulls back the curtain on just how much of really existing religion is sheer projection:

“The psycho-analysis of individual human beings… teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.”

Here Freud holds a mirror up to Genesis’ “God created man in His own image,” broadcasting it in reverse for all of us to consider. Taken on its own, Freud’s declaration might simply be dismissed as a projection of his own troubled relationship with his father onto everyone else’s spirituality; Paul C. Vitz suggests precisely this in Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism. But Freud completes his combination several years later in The Future of an Illusion, a work in which he finally gets around to explaining exactly how God ends up being “nothing other than an exalted father”:

“When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child forever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection. Thus his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness.”

If we are to believe Freud, religion as we know it is intrinsically bound up in fear. Those who would doubt him should be reminded of religion’s track record in regards to aggression, “fight” being one of the three possible responses to fear (“flight”, i.e. “run away,” and “freeze,” i.e. surrender/submission being the other two). A quick Google search finds that an “estimated 809 million people have died in religious wars throughout the ages.” (http://www.ask.com/question/how-many-people-have-died-in-religious-conflicts) Reading this staggering number it is difficult to come away with any other conclusion but that religion is the most effective instrument ever devised for channeling fear into aggression. Freud’s real genius, then, is in connecting the dots between “human weakness” and the erection of human (religious) institutions that manage the resulting terror by projecting it outward, first bouncing it off God the Father and then, on the rebound, directing it via violence conducted in the Name of the Father, very much like a TV signal bouncing off of a satellite before arriving at its mind-control target. (The use of Christian religious terms here signifies my familiarity with them, as well as the unspoken rule that one can criticize one’s own brand but no one else’s, but should not be taken as a suggestion that Christians have any kind of monopoly or “privileged status” in regards to religious war.)

The problem with this analysis, of course, is that religion isn’t just an outlet for aggression; one need look no further than the two towering religious leaders of the twentieth century, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, to know that religion, when done right, brings out the very best in humankind. Religious greatness, nevertheless, cannot undo the legacy of religious crimes. We are blessed with the former and cursed with the latter. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities could just as easily be a tale of one religion: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness , it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

It says here that religion obtains to greatness, spawns its Desmond Tutus, Thich Nhat Hanhs and Dorothy Days in spite, and precisely not because, of the fact that if a police sketch artist sat down with our collective descriptions of God he or she would produce an image of the archetypal father figure. It is the best of times because God is great, the worst of times because the archetypal father is a misplaced idol. The Freudian gamble, if you will, is that we can heal religion’s Dickensian schizophrenia, that the best of times can finally be divorced from the worst of times, if enough of the light of insight can be shone upon the pathological projection of our broken, wounded fathers onto the godhead. (A conclusion reached well within the limits of my rights, being a broken, wounded father myself, if one struggling to be a wounded healer.)

Which is where the aliens come in. (I saw Aliens when it was released with my mom in a movie theater in Orlando, Florida, and it remains superior to 99.44% of all other movies.) If, per Freud, we have essentially made God in our image, then the extraterrestrials, if they accomplished nothing else, would unmake the anthropocentric God. Because why would God want anything to do with our image when She could just as easily select the image of our (vastly more advanced) guests? The great hope is that a God liberated from Her role as an exalted father would no longer function as a container for our fears, nor as an enabler of the unleashing of those fears on the Other. And that worshipping a non-anthropocentric God would be the first step towards realizing a non-anything-centric God, our ticket into a universe where the center holds precisely because there is no center, no fear, and where love spreads. The latter of which happens to be the title of a Stone Roses track, from their sophomore effort The Second Coming, which included these seminal lyrics:

“The messiah is my sister
Ain’t no king man, she’s my queen”

This is a fancy way of saying God is nobody’s father. She belongs to all of us, which, given the uncertain reproductive practices of UFO pilots, may well include citizens of the universe for whom the question “Who’s your daddy?” makes as much sense as the question “What does a five sided square look like?” does to us. I should note that if, in exchange for knowledge of what existence is like in the fifth dimension, we taught the extraterrestrials how to have sex with each other, this would probably be a fair trade. And maybe that’s why they’re here, but they’re shy and when one of us gets close enough for them to ask they chicken out and zoom off, making them a lot like me in high school.

This last speculation includes the anthropocentric assumption that I have been making throughout, which is that the UFOs are here because of us. But perhaps we are completely tangential to their visits. Maybe they’ve recently taken up oil painting and find our CO2-enhanced sunsets the best subjects in the galaxy. Or maybe, if the Gaia principle is correct and the earth is a being with its own advanced intelligence, the aliens are here to talk to her, it being highly unlikely that they’ve traveled this far to hear about our fantasy football teams.

But I hope I’m wrong and they are here to talk to us. Which makes me simultaneously opposed to and in favor of anthropocentrism. “The king is dead; long live the king.” I never did like that second Stone Roses album.