V for Vatican

Although recent episodes of V focused on the soul have not avoided a certain “hokeyness”, I am still on the whole happy to see the show exploring the relationship of faith to extraterrestrial science. There is a clip of a key scene from the last episode on YouTube (unfortunately embedding has been disabled). It depicts Anna’s visit to the Vatican.

If large spacecraft ever actually came to hover over Earth’s cities, it is hard to imagine that we would not see many of the reactions depicted on the show V occurring in real life: fear, awe, resistance, and perhaps something akin to worship. Whether they would welcome missionaries from human religions onboard their ships (all in service of their secret plans to use us for breeding, food, or whatever else), there is surely no real doubt that some human religions would seek the opportunity to send missionaries.

But the impact would run largely in the other direction, if historical experience is anything to go by. Indeed, a useful warning for such a circumstance is found in the cargo cults of Melanesia. Not that it is likely that most people alive in the world today would react to the arrival of extraterrestrials in a manner very similar to the way Pacific islanders reacted to the arrival of a Western military presence. But what we surely would do is interpret the actions and motives of the aliens in light of our own human thinking and customs. Organisms that evolved independently of Earth’s life would, however, inevitably think and act in ways that we would misinterpret more badly than any example of human-to-human cross-cultural misunderstanding could compare with.

On a final note, some mythicists make comparisons between Jesus and John Frum, an important figure in cargo cults. It is not clear whether there was such a figure in history, although it remains possible. But we do know for certain that there was a historical catalyst for the rise of the religious phenomena associated with John Frum, namely the arrival of foreigners with more advanced technology. The first century seems to lack a comparable catalyst, and so it seems that there are probably much closer parallels from the history of religion if one wishes to make sociological comparisons between Jesus and other figures.