The Various Chariots of God

Busy, busy, busy. What with working 9 – 5 (I don’t know how you non-shift worker types handle the daily grind, it’s ridiculous) and trying to get through a bit of Sam Harris and the tangents that’s led me on, time for writing has been at a premium. Nonetheless, I think it’s time I penned a missive concerning one of my favourite hypocrisies concerning modern religion, especially where your more fundamental believer is concerned.

You see, the books that make up the collection that include the Torah, Talmud, Bible and Koran seem to contain many references that could easily be construed to be close encounters of one kind or another. Well, especially if you’re into that sort of thing, but more about that later. First I need to say that personally, I put UFOs and ET firmly in the same basket as God, which is to say that I’ll believe it when I see some firm and testable evidence. Unlike my attitude toward God however, I am at least prepared to admit that there’s enough evidence at this point to suggest that it is at least possible, if not as yet probable, that we are not alone in space.


That said - as it needed to be - I found some “stuff” by way of history that I thought you might find interesting. I was poking around at SETI and got sidetracked by this article by Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer there, that speaks about the theoretical number of planets we might find in our galaxy. Here’s another one that talks about a possible “earth like” planet that’s recently been discovered. It got me to wondering just how far back the whole UFO/alien thing goes and why the bible itself might seem to contain a few tales about such things.

Well, it seems that it goes back quite a ways indeed. Here are some images that have no words to accompany them so really, we can’t be sure. I think you’ll agree however, that some of them do bear an uncanny resemblance to what we would call “aliens” and/or “UFOs” today:

Here’s an image that dates back to about 10,000BCE. It hails from Val Camonica in Italy and is a rather amazing image. They could be wearing some sort of costume and carrying some kind of ceremonial or practical implements, as yet unidentified. Some might say however, that they look a bit like ET, which explains nicely why the implements reman unidentified, but little else.



Then there’s this one from Tassiliin in the Sahara, North Africa which dates to about 6,000BCE. This one’s just freaky! It may be ET or it may be a costume of some kind, who’s to say, but the classic disc in the upper right might just make you wonder.







From my neck of the woods (Aus.) we have the Wandjina petroglyphs from the Kimberly. These lads date to about 5,000BCE.















This interesting looking chap was found in Kiev and dates back to about 4,000BCE.







There are many more than just these, of course. It’s unfortunate that the sites that have the most images seem to be concerned more with conspiracies and what have you, but that seems to be difficult to escape when you go looking for “ufo history” or “ancient ufo”. Nonetheless, drawings and statues like these are found all over the world and date to all eras and as we know, rumours and stories continue to persist today.

Is it any wonder then that there may also be stories of such things, as there are images, that have come to us through the folk law of ancient cultures? Given that the phenomena of the humble UFO could possibly be as old as man himself, I don’t think so. It was after all, the ancient stories, artwork and monuments that led Erich von Däniken to draw the conclusions that he did, erroneously or not.

But then there’s some of the distinctly christian art:




We’ll start with this one by Flemish artist Aert De Gelder in 1710. A classic disc beaming light down on John the Baptist and Jesus. “Beam me up Scotty!” Hehe…:)











Here’s a fifteenth century painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494). Note the detail in the UFO, port holes and everything. One might wonder why so much time was spent on such a small feature, but there it is, plain to see.



This one’s my favourite though. "Glorification of the Eucharist" was painted by Bonaventura Salimbeni to commemorate the Christian Jubilee in 1600 but it does not appear to contain a UFO. It contains, of all things, the humble Sputnik, albeit with only two antennae. Now correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m sure that Sputnik wasn’t launched until Oct. 4 1957. Why then are Jesus and God respectively, each holding one of it’s antennae back in 1600? It’s a conundrum and no mistake.




But, and there’s always one of them, I think it’s an established fact that your more fundamental Christian is not particularly enamoured with the idea that we may not be the only intelligent and sentient beings in the universe. We are after all, supposed to be the pinnacle of God’s creation and the only one like it. “Unique in all creation”, as they say. I find this notion to be quite odd, especially when we begin to read the bible.

We’ll take a little look at Ezekiel here, just as an example:

1:4 I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north - an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The centre of the fire looked like glowing metal

1:16 This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. 17 As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went.

This chapter has an example of just about everything we’ve invented names for today; lenticular clouds, spinning lights, ring lights, classic “flying saucers” zooming around, etc. It seems a bit weird to me now, but there was I time I’d read this and see it all as evidence of God’s power and all round mightiness. Now I find I’m turning the page in anticipation of a description of the resulting crop circle, which viewed from the vantage of that hill over there, bears an uncanny resemblance to King Jehoiachin, alas…

But as I said earlier, fundamental Christians do not tend to believe that ET is a possibility. There’s no room for it, you see. Once every spare nook and cranny is filled with Jesus, there’s just not enough space left for anything else, not even “common” sense, or so it seems. Even so, it does seem a tad hypocritical to me to ridicule someone else’s belief in ET while at the same time subscribing to a book that has no less than 362 descriptions of what in today’s language would be nothing more than first, second or third hand reports of UFO sightings and rather dubious ones at that.

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Atheism - What it means to me

I found myself watching a documentary series over at Beep’s the other day, concerning the history of atheism (“Atheism – A rough history of disbelief” by Jonathan Miller). It was a brilliant series which I seem to have gotten quite a lot out of. It caused me to think about some of the many facets of atheism (and belief) and wonder about what it really means to me to be an “atheist” or if indeed, I am one at all. There’s no doubt that I’ve certainly thought of myself as an atheist and have definitely been labelled as such from time to time but to be honest, I’m not sure I really fit the mould any more.

Early on in the first episode he said something that made me take notice and a mild sort of umbrage; “for those of us that enjoy the luxury of thoughtless disbelief.” I’m sure however, that most of my fellow bloggers, believers included that may read this post will probably agree with me when I say that there’s really nothing thoughtless about our disbelief (or belief) at all. Rather, it’s because we’ve thought about it that we’ve come to the conclusions that we have.

But so it seems to me when I see things like this and read Dawkins or Harris, that atheism has gained an air of staunch disbelief which I’m not sure I share quite so completely as some.

You see, if you were to ask me if I believe that God does exist, I would simply say that I do not know. If however, you were to ask me if I believe that God does not exist, I would simply say that I do not know. That does not mean that I’m not of the opinion that He probably doesn’t though, but I’ll get to that. To me it’s quite simple and logical and it was part of the process that lead me away from religion in general, not just Christianity.

In examining and discussing whether or not God exists, we soon come to the stark realisation that the argument has no tangible, or at least no observable evidence to support either side. So therefore once again, viewed in the stark light of logic and common sense, if there can be no firm case made for either the affirmative or the negative, then the answer, obviously, lies somewhere in between. To me, what lies in between “yes” and “no” is “I don’t know”, the rest is pure conjecture.

As I said however, that doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion. I am the sort of person that likes to see a bit of evidence before I believe something is implicitly true after all, and I don’t think there’s any reason why that same rationale should not be applied to God. And so it is that I’ve arrived at my opinion that due to a serious lack of evidence, God, and everything that goes with Him, probably does not exist and probably never did.

I’m also of the opinion though, that if God does exist and should deign to provide us some direct evidence of his existence, then I would certainly change my opinion to the affirmative. But this is where I seem to differ with people like those I mention above. I find I simply cannot be as adamant as some are when it comes to pure “disbelief”.

Dawkins will quite happily tell you “God does not exist”. To me, that claim seems a little outlandish. We all know, Dawkins included, that he cannot furnish any proof of that claim, so what that statement is, is pure assertion and is nothing more than an opinion. One that I happen to agree with, but an opinion none the less. That said however, I’m sure that like me, if god should meter out a bit of personal smiting in the Dawkins direction, he’d pretty soon change his tune I think. But I think the only real difference here is that I am quite happy to admit to ignorance and say “I don’t know” whereas Dawkins needs an answer.

Admittedly, “I don’t know, but I doubt it” isn’t really much of a stance to take on the whole God thing is it? But the way I figure it is this. If God really wanted me to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that He exists, then He would tell me so in no uncertain and very godly terms, I’m sure. So it’s obvious to me that at this juncture, He would very much like me to remain ignorant of His Devine person, and probably His Devine plan as well, and so I shall until He (or it) deigns that I need to know.

The other problem I have with God is that if there is such a thing, I think it would have to be much bigger and better than any of the models we’ve come up with so far. It seems to me, as I look at different religions and try and make sense of the why and how of what they believe, that most deities seem at best to behave like petulant children or at worst, like “senile delinquents”, as Tennessee Williams puts it. To be honest, I don’t really think a god that has the power to create a whole universe out of nothing needs the likes of us to worship him “or else”, nor has he any business behaving the way he has in the past. No, if a god does exists in the context of being the kind of god that can create a whole universe out of nothing, then I think it’s more likely to be something so unutterably alien to us that we probably wouldn’t recognise it as such anyway. Do I worry about what might happen to me when I die? Well, here's a tip…;)

That leaves me just one more question. So what’s the bible all about? Well, it’s a fantastic collection of extremely ancient stories that carry a common theme. I think some of them, especially the Pentateuch, are much older (the stories themselves, not the texts) than we give them credit for and that others may be much younger than we give them credit for. It doesn’t matter though. As Jonathan Miller said, my life would have been much poorer had I not been exposed to those stories and the magnificent works, in all aspects of art and literature, that they have inspired.

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Complete crap! Get rid of it...