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| Extraterrestrial Aliens May Not Be What You Think | |||
Because the human race has enjoyed a relative explosion of technological breakthroughs in more recent centuries, leading civilization to new levels of both leisure and understanding, we sometimes tend to think we know a lot more about the world and the universe than we really do. It is a trait of youth to think that we know all that is worth knowing. And since our perceptions of the "new universe" are relatively young, we often carry that misconception. Other views of the world have been around a lot longer. The Bible, for example has been around for more than a few centuries. And there are other stories and traditions that also date back thousands of years. In some of these are bits of "explanation" that give peeks into an interesting array of details about the origins of life and the of the universe itself. In the more recent centuries, both science and philosophy have often attacked the Bible and Christian tradition in a growing effort to break free of religious constraints that were sometimes suffocating. Religion has a way of trying to cast ideas and even wisdom itself into a rigid form that never changes. True understanding, like faith itself, is always changing and (hopefully) ever growing. Some of the contention between science and the Bible has been caused, as already noted, by religion itself. But some has also been the product of human nature. In our efforts to "come of age," human adolescents often begin to resist and rebel against parental authority, trying to break free of the rules, the family customs, and all constraints. Likewise, many fields of science, to the very day, are always pushing against the old barriers, finding a way over the walls of old ideas, traditions, and morals.
But this discussion is not really about that struggle, per se. I merely wish to put a little light on the background of many of our present ideas, and show why some currently popular and developing views of other-worldly visitors consciously avoid the influence of more ancient understanding. For, while most modern students of UFOs and extraterrestrials may be willing to interpret the past in light of the present understanding, we are less willing to interpret our popular ideas today in light of the older knowledge and revelation. The misconception we usually carry with us is that we know more now about what kind of life may be "out there." But what if our improved technologies are distracting us, helping to blind us to realities older than time itself? The real question, of course, is not how much we know, but how much we are willing to learn. If we learn more truth, how much will that truth change us? That is often the real barrier to human understanding: the unwillingness to change. |
