(Continued from This Is Not a Test of the Emergency Broadcast System)
If I want to see where things are headed and what is considered the hottest subject, I don’t look at prime time TV news or mainstream news outlets.
I follow the money trail that has been picked up by smaller magazines and radio news coverage because this is where the real events are happening.
In one of my previous posts, I asked a fundamental question posed by an online magazine: How Do We Tell The World We’ve Found Alien Life?
This question was not asked on the fly, nor was it an idle question dreamed up by some bored grad students during their break time in between their more important thesis research.
This question is part and parcel of another question that is even more fundamentally disturbing. That question is:
How would Christianity be impacted by the discovery of alien life?
This question was SO IMPORTANTthat last year, NASA’s Astrobiology Program gave the Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI) $1.108 million dollars to conduct an intense research on the implication that alien life would have on our society…specifically on our Christian society. [1]
Now, I may be a bit slow, but…
$1.108 million dollars???!!!
Why, in god’s name, would a cash-strapped organization like NASA–an organization that, heretofore, had barely been able to garner sufficient funds to pay for a crippled space program–throw away over a million dollars in an attempt to get unscientific, ambiguous answers from a single source (the Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI)), an organization that has nothing to do with the legitimate scientific methodology of space science?
You know what…they should give some of that excess cash to the Taobabe. I’m a terrible webmistress and I can barely maintain this website. If it wasn’t for the amazing charity of WordPress, I’d never be able to keep this site up and running. (I love you, WordPress! Mwah!!!) 😀
In exchange for a tiny bit of those wasted funds (a few thousand dollars to pay a webmaster for a page redesign would be enough, no need for a million) I could tell them what they need to know, and what they’ve asked CTI to find out.
Look. Just by using some of my air-head Taobabe brains and noodling through this in a basic and simple manner, I can safely say that if irrefutable proof of alien life were to suddenly occur globally, I can guarantee you that everything would change. All those organized religions that heretofore had INSISTED that there were no such things as aliens, would either have to adapt and include the newfound axiom (like the Catholic Church did) [2] or dismiss it altogether, causing intense embarrassment to their believers who will be branded ignorant and intolerant of the truth by everyone around them. Those believers will do one of the following. They will:
- Lose all faith and become atheists.
- Stubbornly cling to the old teachings and become social pariahs.
- Hide out in the hills with guns and canned foods, waiting for the end of the world, which won’t come. Meanwhile, the world will charge forward into a new paradigm of living without them.
Problem solved and we’ve still got over a million dollars of taxpayer money that could be better spent elsewhere, like funding the highly-recommended MASSIVE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS of alien-disclosure to the public in a manner that will allow for the peaceful integration of said aliens into the general humdrum daily life of humanity, and vice-versa.
(well…it’s only Taobabe’s highly-recommended massive-educational-process, but this is my weblog and I can say anything I wish.)
But having said that, I have another question of my own.
Why don’t they do a million-dollar study on the impact of alien life on Muslims, or Hindus, or Buddhists?
Or (gasp) TAOISTS?
Eh, on second thought, do we really need to be told this?
I mean–it’s not really a huge deal for us Taoists. After all, the I Ching has been telling us for thousands of years about the suprahumans who interacted with humans and gave us the necessary wisdom to survive the dark ages of humanity. Although there is no mention about who the suprahumans were and what they looked like, from the various accounts scattered throughout the I Ching and various other Wings, we can deduce something of their characteristics.
In the Shuo Kua: Discussion of the Trigrams [1], it is stated that [t]he established language for communication with suprahuman intelligences was based on numbers and their symbolism. [3]
The numbering system that was used in the I Ching is binary (yin-yang, yes-no, light-dark), pointing to a machine-code type of system. This gives rise to my initial thought that perhaps the ones who gave us the I Ching could possibly be highly advanced computerized life forms, or hybrid bio-computerized forms. To be fair, I was young and rather ignorant at the time that I came to this conclusion. I’m not so sure about this any more, but it is still wafting around in my mind, this tantalizing idea.
In any case, the first section of the I Ching talks about the fundamental principles of the consultation machinery that was the hexagrams. It was clearly noted that the suprahumans did not communicate directly with the humans using guttural grunts and chest-pounding gesticulations. They used this binary method.
As divine beings do not give direct expression to the ir knowledge, a means had to be found by which they could make themselves intelligible. Suprahuman intelligence has from the beginning made use of three mediums of expression–men, animals, and plants, in each of which life pulsates in a different rhythm. Chance came to be utilized as a fourth medium; the very absence of an immediate meaning in chance permitted a deeper meaning to come to expression in it. ~ Richard Wilhelm trans of I Ching [3]
In one of my postings, Copper Nickel Alloy Oracle, a few years back, I touched upon the three mediums of expression. There is much more about this that I need to discuss further about this subject, but there is so much other stuff to talk about that this has been left to wither on the vine. My bad.
My point in bringing this forth is that the I Ching is repleted with passages that talk about these ancient suprahumans, those who come from beyond the stars. This is old news. Thousands of years old. You’re preaching to the choir here.
In fact, to do the I Ching absolute justice, and to do NASA a small favor (for free, even!) I will cast a I Ching reading, asking this very question (How would Christianity be impacted by the discovery of alien life?) and I will post my answer in short order.
You’re welcome, NASA.
(Continue to Hexagram 30–The Clinging Fire)
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[1] NASA funding for Center for Theological Inquiry
[2] Vatican Astronomer Says Alien Life Will Be Discovered
[3] The Ta Chuan, translation by Richard Wilhelm
Taobabe 