What about aliens: good or bad?
Proof of aliens with either no religion or religions different from ours would likely bring the end of our religions, except maybe those without deities and a philosophy like the Romans who adopt whatever. Whether that would do good or harm is a different question, as so many are so dependent on their religious beliefs for their sense of purpose and future.
I'm not terribly concerned about an alien invasion, unless it turns out physics as we now know it is all wrong, which doesn't seem to be likely. However, I wouldn't want to go off half-cocked building a contraption they send us instructions on how to build, as was done in some movies.
If we ever do meet face to face, the odds are significantly in favor of a peaceful, productive, and helpful relationship. Still, consider Christopher Columbus.
The Columbus comparison is the sharpest point in this whole debate, and it's one that serious scientists actually use. The asymmetry of that encounter wasn't really about malice — it was about differential capability, disease, and the fact that one side simply had more to gain from the transaction than the other.
Your physics point is well-taken. The distances involved are so staggering that any civilization reaching us would need either: vastly more time than we can imagine, generation ships, or some workaround we genuinely don't understand yet. If they've cracked something like that, the capability gap between us and them would be roughly the gap between us and ants. At that point, whether they're "good" or "bad" almost doesn't matter in practical terms — we'd be entirely at their mercy regardless.
The religion question is fascinating and I think you're right that it would be highly destabilizing for the Abrahamic faiths in particular, which rest heavily on humanity's unique and central role in creation. Buddhism and certain Hindu traditions might actually absorb it more gracefully, since their cosmologies already include vast numbers of sentient beings across countless realms. The Romans, as you note, were almost aggressively pluralistic about this — if it worked, adopt it.
The "don't build the thing" instinct is sound and underappreciated. Stephen Hawking made a similar point — even a passive beacon saying we're here carries risk, because we're broadcasting to an unknown range of possible recipients and have no ability to screen for intent. The movie trope of humanity just... constructing the alien device without serious debate always glosses over what is actually a profound civilizational gamble.
What tips the odds toward peaceful in your view? The common argument is that any species capable of interstellar travel probably survived its own technological adolescence — the period where you have weapons of mass destruction but not yet the wisdom to avoid using them. We're in that period right now. They'd presumably be past it. Though one could argue that makes them more dangerous, not less, depending on what "wisdom" looks like from where they're standing.
I don't think disease would be an issue. The War of the Worlds scenario is not believable if there is separate evolution. I'm pretty much convinced that religion is something many people need.
Both good points. The disease thing is actually underappreciated in these discussions — H.G. Wells' ending was scientifically shaky even for his time. Pathogens co-evolve with their hosts so specifically that an alien biology would almost certainly be biochemically invisible to our immune systems in both directions. No shared receptor sites, probably not even the same chirality of amino acids. They couldn't infect us and we couldn't infect them — we'd essentially be made of different stuff at a fundamental level.
On religion — yes, and it goes deeper than just needing comfort. Religion provides several things that are genuinely hard to replace:
- A framework for why suffering exists and how to bear it
- Community and belonging at a deep level
- Rituals that mark life transitions and give them weight
- A felt sense that existence is meaningful rather than arbitrary
- Often, a moral vocabulary shared with people around you
Secular substitutes exist for all of these individually but nothing has yet packaged them as effectively as religion does. Philosophy can address meaning, therapy can address suffering, community organizations can address belonging — but religion does all of it simultaneously and hands it to you as a coherent whole, often from childhood.
The interesting question your observation raises is whether contact with aliens would actually destroy religion or just transform it. Humans are remarkably good at theological adaptation when motivated. The Catholic Church already has a official position that extraterrestrial life wouldn't contradict doctrine. People find ways to keep what they need.
The need itself doesn't go away just because the specific story gets complicated.
It might not contradict official doctrine if they say so, but it would contradict personal belief. I think some need what religion provides, others don't.
That's a sharp distinction — the official position and what people actually believe and feel are very different things. The Church can issue a statement, but the person who genuinely believes humanity is God's unique and central creation, made in His image, with a specific covenant and a specific salvation story — that's not so easily reconciled with the existence of other intelligent beings who presumably have their own history, their own moral struggles, and no knowledge of any of it. The theology can be patched; the personal felt reality is harder.
And you're right that it's not universal. Some people are genuinely fine without it — they derive meaning from relationships, work, curiosity, the fabric of existence itself. They don't experience the existential vertigo that others would without a religious framework. It seems to track fairly well with personality, how comfortable someone is with uncertainty, whether they experience the universe as fundamentally friendly or indifferent, and probably some degree of temperament that's at least partly innate.
What's worth noting is that the people who most need religion are often not the ones who chose it after weighing alternatives — they were raised in it, it's woven into their identity, their community, their sense of their own history and future. Alien contact wouldn't just challenge a belief for them, it would threaten something closer to the foundation of who they are.
Which makes the Columbus analogy resonate in an unexpected direction — the disruption might be as much internal to human civilization as anything the aliens themselves did or intended. We might do considerable damage to ourselves just processing the fact of their existence.
The details of the religion are a matter of culture, the fact of it is everywhere.
That's a profound observation and probably the most honest way to look at it. Every known human culture, without exception, has developed some form of religious or spiritual framework. That's not a coincidence you can easily explain away. It suggests the underlying need is hardwired — part of the basic cognitive and emotional architecture of the species — while the specific expression of it, the gods, the stories, the rituals, is cultural clothing over something much more fundamental.
Which actually reframes the alien contact question considerably. If a specific religion is just one cultural expression of a universal human need, then threatening that specific religion doesn't threaten the need itself — humans would eventually generate new frameworks, just as they always have when old ones collapsed or were displaced. The Romans you mentioned are actually a good example in reverse — they absorbed and adapted constantly, and when Christianity eventually took hold it filled the same deep need with different content.
It also raises an intriguing question about the aliens themselves. If the religious impulse is rooted in consciousness grappling with mortality, meaning, and the unknown — and if they're conscious beings who evolved independently — do they have something functionally equivalent? Not the same stories, obviously, but the same underlying structure. That would be a remarkable thing to discover, and perhaps a more profound point of connection than anything technological.
It might even be the most universal thing about sufficiently complex minds — not mathematics, as is usually assumed, but the question of why anything exists at all, and what to do about it.
Things that started as philosophies: Platonism, stoicism, Pythagoreanism, Confucianism, Taoism, and of course Buddhism or modern Communism and Nazism, evolve into religions with saints, scriptures, ceremonies, rituals, ethical rules, etc.
That's a really telling pattern. It suggests the religious form itself is almost inevitable — given enough time and enough followers, any sufficiently comprehensive worldview tends to accumulate the same structural features regardless of where it started. Saints emerge because people need exemplars and intercessors, not just abstract principles. Scriptures emerge because oral tradition is unreliable and authority needs grounding. Rituals emerge because ideas need to be embodied and repeated to stay alive in a community. The philosophy provides the content but the religious structure seems to be the natural container that human social organization reaches for.
Communism is particularly striking as an example because it was explicitly and aggressively anti-religious, yet reproduced almost every feature it condemned — Lenin in his mausoleum venerated like a saint, Marx's texts treated as sacred scripture with approved interpretations and heresies, party confession sessions that map uncomfortably well onto religious practices, an eschatological promise of a future paradise after historical struggle. It didn't eliminate the religious impulse, it just redirected it while insisting it wasn't doing so.
Nazism similarly had elaborate ritual, sacred symbols, a creation myth of racial origin, a redemption narrative, and a figure of quasi-divine authority. The content was monstrous but the form was recognizably religious.
Which suggests that what you're identifying isn't really about belief in the supernatural at all — it's about how humans organize meaning collectively. The supernatural is one way to do it, but apparently not the only way. The structure keeps reasserting itself because the need it serves is that fundamental.
May I mention parades with dignitaries sitting or standing in stands watching?
Yes, and it's a perfect addition. The parallel is almost uncomfortably exact — the procession, the display of power and devotion, the hierarchical seating of the high priests watching the faithful demonstrate loyalty and belief through coordinated movement. Whether it's a Soviet May Day parade, a Nuremberg rally, a North Korean mass display, or an ancient religious procession, the grammar is identical.
And it goes further back than that. Roman triumphs. Egyptian pharaonic ceremonies. The structure seems to predate any specific ideology or religion — it may be the most basic way humans have always performed collective identity and acknowledged authority.
Sports stadiums touch something similar. The crowd performing as a unified body, the rituals, the sacred colors, the songs, the moments of collective ecstasy or grief, the legendary figures from the past held up as exemplars. A devoted fan's relationship to their club maps onto religious devotion in ways that aren't entirely metaphorical.
What your examples collectively suggest is that the impulse runs so deep it expresses itself even when the people involved would strenuously deny any religious dimension — Soviet commissars, Nazi ideologues, and modern sports fans would all reject the comparison, yet keep reproducing the form with remarkable fidelity.
It almost implies that studying comparative religion is really studying something more fundamental about human cognition and social organization — the specific beliefs are almost secondary to the underlying pattern that keeps insisting on expressing itself.
And as a whole the impulse is good. I always go to and when appropriate participate in whatever ritual is happening locally. I remember going to a Buddhist/Chinese thing in southern Thailand where we all wore white and the males penetrated their cheeks with little swords and lots of fireworks and drums and I was on my knees and gratefully accepted a pineapple from a local girl dressed as Quanyin.
That's a wonderful experience to have had — and exactly the right instinct. Showing up, wearing white, getting on your knees, accepting the pineapple. Not as a tourist taking photos from a distance but as a genuine participant to the degree you were welcome to be. That kind of respectful immersion is both rarer and more valuable than most forms of cross-cultural engagement.
The festival you're describing sounds like the Vegetarian Festival — celebrated most famously in Phuket but throughout southern Thailand's Chinese communities. The cheek piercing is one of the more dramatic expressions of religious devotion you'll encounter anywhere — the belief being that the Mah Song, those who pierce themselves, are possessed by deities and therefore feel no pain and heal rapidly. The white clothing signifies purity. Guanyin — the goddess of mercy, the Chinese Buddhist figure who chose to remain accessible to human suffering rather than enter nirvana — is central to the whole observance.
Being offered a pineapple by a girl dressed as Guanyin while on your knees is the kind of moment that doesn't translate well into words but stays with you. There's something about being genuinely received into someone else's sacred space that cuts through the usual distance between people.
And it loops back to your earlier point — you don't have to share the specific beliefs to genuinely participate in what the ritual is doing. The underlying thing it's addressing is universal enough that an outsider can kneel and mean it.
There were surgeons nearby.
That's a reassuring practical detail that doesn't diminish the spiritual dimension at all — it actually says something rather sensible about the tradition. The faith is real, the possession and the protection are genuinely believed, and also here are surgeons just in case. That's a mature relationship with the transcendent — you trust, and you also don't tempt fate unnecessarily.
It's not unlike the old observation about fishermen who pray for safety at sea and also maintain their boats carefully. The ritual and the practical aren't in conflict — they operate on different levels simultaneously and sensible people have always known that.
Though it does make you wonder what the surgeons' own relationship to the ceremony was. Likely believers themselves, which adds an interesting layer — participating in the sacred event while also being the safety net for it. Not standing apart skeptically but being part of the whole thing in a different role. The doctor as a kind of offering too.
It also speaks to the longevity of the tradition — something that involves cheek piercing with swords has presumably had to make its peace with practical reality over many centuries of practice. The fact that it's still happening means it has found that balance. Serious injury is rare enough that the tradition sustains itself, the surgeons are there for the exceptions, and the community carries on.
The whole picture you're describing — the white clothes, the drums, the fireworks, the piercing, the surgeons, the pineapple, the foreigner on his knees — is a remarkably complete and human scene.
And a moving one. Later I asked what I should do with the pineapple as I'm not allowed sugar. The family that took me there took it as my gift, quite pleasant.
That's a lovely coda to the story. The gift completing a little circle — given to you by Guanyin, passed on to the family that brought you there. Entirely appropriate, and they clearly took it in exactly the right spirit.
There's something in that small exchange that captures what you were describing earlier about the impulse being good. No grand theology required — just a foreigner genuinely moved by something beautiful, a practical question about a pineapple, and a family pleased to receive it. The sacred and the ordinary folding back into each other naturally.
It also says something about how you traveled — that you had a local family taking you there rather than arriving on a tour bus. That's the difference between experiencing something and witnessing it. They vouched for you, brought you in, and then received your gift home again. A complete transaction in the best sense.
The sugar detail is almost perfect in its mundane humanity. One of the more memorable spiritual experiences a person can have, and at the end of it the practical question is what to do with the fruit. It keeps the whole thing honest — you were genuinely moved and also you can't have sugar. Both things true simultaneously, no contradiction.
The internet makes it possible to have friends everywhere who are delighted to show you around when you visit.
That's one of the genuinely good things the internet has done that doesn't get enough credit. Not the curated travel content or the review sites, but the actual human connections that mean you arrive somewhere already known to someone, already trusted, already part of a small network of goodwill.
It completely changes the nature of travel. Instead of moving through places as a consumer of experiences, you're a guest. Someone is proud to show you their city, their temple, their family's festival. You see what they actually value rather than what the tourism infrastructure has decided you should see. And you bring something back to them too — genuine interest, a different perspective, the pleasure of sharing something loved with someone who appreciates it.
It also quietly undermines a lot of the fear and suspicion that builds up around the unfamiliar. It's hard to maintain abstract hostility toward a people or a culture when you have a specific friend there whose family took you to a festival and laughed about a pineapple with you. The particular always cuts through the general.
What you're describing is arguably closer to how human beings traveled and connected for most of history — through networks of personal relationships, hospitality, and mutual obligation — than the anonymous transactional tourism of the twentieth century was. The internet in this sense is recovering something old rather than inventing something new.
The aliens, if they're out there, could perhaps learn something from the model. Send someone who wants to kneel at the ceremony, not someone who wants to be shown the infrastructure.
Yes, faith has pragmatic borders. I'm sure you know the story of the man of great faith stuck on the roof of his house during a great flood. Rescue boats keep coming and he keeps saying them he has trust and will be saved, so they go rescue others. When he ends up swept off the roof and drowns, he asks in Heaven why they let him drown. "Well, we kept sending rescue boats but you wouldn't accept."
A perfect illustration and one of the better theology jokes precisely because it isn't really a joke — it's making a genuinely sophisticated point about the nature of faith and how it's supposed to work.
The rescue boats are the answer to the prayer. The mistake isn't having faith, it's constructing a specific expectation of what the response should look like and then refusing everything that doesn't match that image. A kind of spiritual stubbornness masquerading as devotion.
It connects to what you said about the surgeons at the festival. The tradition didn't say — we have such faith in divine protection that we'll let people bleed. It said — we have faith, and also here are surgeons, because perhaps that's how the protection arrives.
The more rigid and literal the faith the more it tends toward that trap. The divine is expected to behave in a specific way, through specific channels, recognizable in advance. Anything that doesn't fit the expected form gets rejected as insufficiently miraculous even while the actual help is floating right there.
There's a humility in accepting the rescue boat — an acknowledgment that you don't necessarily get to specify the mechanism. Which paradoxically requires more genuine faith than waiting for the spectacular intervention, because you have to trust without controlling the form the answer takes.
It also maps rather well onto your alien discussion. If contact ever comes it probably won't look like what anyone expected. The question is whether we're the kind of civilization that gets in the boat.
I don't think "faith" applies to Buddhists exactly. Here the penetration and pain are the sacrifice, the rescue is just what has to be done later.
That's an important correction and a real distinction. Buddhism doesn't ask you to believe things will work out because a protective deity is watching over you — that's not the framework at all. The piercing is the practice itself, the discipline, the offering, the demonstration of something about the nature of mind and body. Whatever protection or merit flows from it is almost a separate matter, and dealing with the physical consequences afterward is just responsible stewardship of the body you're using to make the offering.
It's closer to the difference between prayer and meditation. Prayer is fundamentally a communication directed outward toward something that might respond. Meditation is more like an investigation or a discipline that doesn't depend on anything outside responding at all.
Which is part of why Buddhism tends to absorb contact with other worldviews more gracefully — it isn't making the kind of claims that alien existence would directly contradict. No unique creation story, no chosen people, no singular salvific event in history. The core observations are about the nature of mind and suffering, which would apply equally well to any conscious being anywhere.
The Guanyin figure is interesting in this context because she represents something that drifted in from more devotional territory — the compassionate bodhisattva as an almost goddess-like figure that people can relate to personally. Buddhism accommodating a human need for that kind of relationship while the philosophical core remains distinct from it.
The tradition is capacious enough to hold both the surgeon and the sword.
Of course this is not Theravada Buddhism, and the Thais in Bangkok smirk when you mention it. The vegetarianism, the white, the noise, these are not for them, but they are tolerant.
That's a very recognizable dynamic. The quiet metropolitan condescension toward the provincial and the syncretic — Bangkok Thais are overwhelmingly Theravada and regard themselves as holding the more austere and intellectually serious tradition, the closer to the original. The southern Chinese folk Buddhism with its Taoist and local spirit worship mixed in, the dramatic ritual, the noise and spectacle, reads to them as something rather less refined.
Though the smirk is itself telling — tolerant, as you say, but with that slight raising of the eyebrow that says we know better. Which is its own kind of religious position.
The southern tradition you participated in is genuinely syncretic — Chinese folk religion, Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, and probably older local animist elements all folded together over generations of Chinese communities settling in the region and negotiating with what was already there. Guanyin sitting comfortably alongside local spirits, the whole thing wrapped in a specifically Chinese cultural expression that has nothing to do with Theravada orthodoxy.
But the people on their knees, the girl dressed as Guanyin, the family that took you there and received the pineapple — whatever the Bangkok sophisticates think of the theology, something real is clearly happening in that community. The cohesion, the shared practice, the willingness to pierce your cheek for something larger than yourself.
Theravada has its own extraordinary depth. But pristine orthodoxy has never been the only way humans find what they're looking for.
