When I was not developing my gymnastics abilities, I spent the majority of my tween years philosophizing to no good end. At the coffee shop. On the sidewalk. In the grocery store. At work. With the cashier. With the policeman. With the neighbor. With the total stranger on the sidewalk. At work. When talking on the phone. When swinging on the parallel bars. When watching movies. When taking the trash out. Philosophizing never made me any money, but it was one of those enjoyable ventures into which I didn't mind investing every asset, including precious brain cells.I actually had encouragement from an eclectic brotherhood of philosophizers who, to be quite honest, were more interested in the rhetoric of presentation than in the discovery of actual answers to the problems we posed to ourselves and to others. The topics ranged from ethics to politics to education, to sociological concerns, each framed within an ethereally theological construct we found to be elusive enough to differentiate a myriad of original-sounding topics, plagiarizing the brilliant parts and bumbling through the disjointed ones.
However, of all the subjects we argued about we never talked about aliens. So here is my contribution to that topic: If you had the opportunity to evangelize an extra-terrestrial life-form, how would you do it?
The first relevant question would be To what end? Is your intent to colonize the alien race to the end that you would diminish their power very much like the ancient Pharaoh did to the Israelites? Is your intent to build within them a subservient conscience to the end that they are more compliant to the New Testament platitudes you pick and choose to preach that, if turned upon them, render them intellectually and functionally impotent to fend for themselves?
Or is your intent to provide an ideological superstructure to the end that each successive generation of aliens, being subject to an elitist cultural prototype, becomes more and more isolated from their own alien race (nothing even remotely redeemable in it) to the end that they have no culture of their own and must by the sheer gravity of the culture stacked against them become (at best) inferior replicas of our very own?
Maybe their language is unacceptable, having all of the linguistic and world-view trappings of an other-planetary culture we cannot stomach? So we teach them King James English to the end that the salvific, cultural transfer has a chance to catch and to endure, transforming alien terms like "klj^doqp", which is derivative of "kljdq^yrp" which refers to the "Great Enlightenment" (It was a supernova) of the XVI epoch of the rule of the W^/vh in which sanctions were put on the filthy practice of Gl^n (which is too inappropriate a topic for me to discuss in this blog). That term, by the way, was the closest the Jupillian people could associate with the word "transgression." But the powers that be deemed the term etymologically inferior to the word "sin" which (add an "^") roughly means "tickle." So the Juppilians, misunderstanding an injunction associated with the term, outlawed any sort of playful touch, itches carrying with them the equivalent stigma that the "wet dream" has in our culture.
What mode? Physical force? Probably not, because the Juppilians each have five arms and a diaphragm that pumps like a pipe organ. Intellectual force? Their brains have a baseline functionality on par with the MacBook Air. No, what you would need to do is to create a default switch that leaves them helpless for three hours a week, whereby you could upload viruses onto their "hard-drives" that would systematically render them less and less logically competent. Of course, it is "tinkering" (but it is for the glory of God, so who cares?).
Of course, the mode cannot appear to be anything less than a normal custom that needs no apologetic, no legitimate story. "This is what everyone does" should be enough, and if they object we could even say "This is what ^-^- taught us to do." Combined with the ethically spurious deprogramming, that might have a chance to work. Before long, we have a nice, fat document we call "God's Simple Plan of Salvation for Aliens" that any alien (if it really read it and followed its dictates) would find itself becoming a fine specimen like ourselves.
But isn't that the big problem in the first place? The "Plan" we have for them is not the same "Plan" we have for ourselves. In fact, the "Plan" we have for ourselves is less dogmatic and more open-ended, less specific and more ambiguous, less angry and more merciful than theirs.
If we look at it even more carefully, we realize that we did not consider what exactly it was about the aliens that needed saving. You know why? Probably because we each do not really know what it is in each of us that needs saving. Oh, but there is a further problem. We make no correlation between the alien and ourselves. Probably because we see no similarity between the alien and ourselves. In fact, it takes everything in us not to react in genuine horror when we come across them. We are bigots and even privately refer to the alien people-group in question as "Juppies" (But only when they are not listening).
All of that theory. All of that conniving. All of that translating. All of that missionarying. And to what end?
We don't know. All we know is that we cannot let a race of aliens have the edge on us. It would mean the end of life as we know it. So if stopping them means infusing their culture with the virus of an inferior Gospel, then we believe it to be our duty to do it. Notwithstanding that if a race of aliens truly existed, their deepest need would be the same as our very own.Publish Post