A Forest Through the Trees

It’s about time for another crazy rant. Here we go.

I hate supporters of the ancient astronaut theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts). I also hate supporters of panspermia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia), but that is for another post. For now let us concentrate on the Ancient Astronaut Theory (here forth known as AA).

AA claims that at some point in prehistory aliens came to earth and gifted us with knowledge and technology. This gifting accounts for our culture, our tools, and our religions. Most support for this theory comes from cave paintings, ancient architecture, and early written accounts. The theory is that such massive creations, such pointless creations, would not be created without another purpose.

AA’s absurdity is more offensive than its illogical leaps. How does one look at religious centers and doubt man’s ability to create something for no reason other than worship. We still do it today. It is, of course, unscientific to assume we do it for God, but are aliens any better? Why do people find it more comforting to assume aliens over a benevolent God? This is what I talk about when I say ‘modernity’. We’ve got our heads jammed so far up our scientific assholes that we assume just because technology is involved that it must be more true. But isn’t this the same argument as the world resting on a tortoises back? When does the ’seeding’ end? When does man \ alien get credited for doing something on its own? Something creative and without purpose? Or something spiritual? I assume the answer is never, for a believer in AA, one would speculate that the same thing happened to those aliens and so on.

There are other problems, other than its fanatical modernism. It bases its theory on ancient depictions of aliens. It then says “See! It looks just like how we picture aliens?” Ok, genius, and how many people that draw aliens have actually seen one? How many worship them? Of course they look similar! We do the same things to aliens that they did to Gods…we make them look human. So of course they all look similar because they all look like us! So they have a dome on their head? Cyclopes had one eye, maybe they were relatives of Mike Wazowski. AA basically rapes man’s ability to be creative and discounts it as merely experiential but fails to realize that the real cause of this is our imagination being too similar to those of our ancestors. We simply can’t picture things not being like us.

Then, worst of all, AA discredits what could be their only allies. In many cases they simply contradict or deny the accounts given to them by archeologist (hence the closest we get to firsthand accounts). Why were the pyramids built? To house the dead. Not to position some space mother ship. Firsthand accounts tell us of a love for astronomy, not because of visitors from another realm, but because it was so huge! Sure a sky God might be a plausible (though ridiculous) alien, but what of Hades lord of the underworld. I suppose we have mole people too.

To add to this most ancient deities were cruel. They killed, tortured, and sometimes raped people. If these aliens are like that, why didn’t they conquer our globe. AA likes to say aliens helped us along and that this caused our ideas of a benevolent God, but let us ask the Indians about what happens when aliens visit their shores with other intent. The ancients did believe that Gods did such things as well… or are those stories magically made up while the other stories are inspired by historical fact (alien visitation)?

How screwed up is our society? We have become so modern that a belief in God is nearing impossible so to indulge our spiritual side we comfort ourselves with aliens? We have to give it a material cause, don’t we? It can’t be something greater, something more than matter, it must be something we can eventually find and study and conquer. It must be something we can ‘figure out’. How can AA look for clues in the pyramids, the bible, and cave paintings and not see the God that is so clearly in them? Like not seeing a forest through the trees.