religion versus belief in aliens?

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Both ET and God are idiotic and justifiably mocked. I mean, just because the "magic" is supposed to go in with physical laws doesn't mean that it's better. Science fiction isn't a more realistic or rational genre than fantasy, and the two are lumped together often enough that it just needs to be recognized that the label "science" on an idea doesn't mean that it is good.

It is an ongoing problem with humans that they will mock even the trivially deviant and stgone the Green Monkey.

Philologos - Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction. Lucas himself calls it a "space fantasy".

Dr. David Brin has answered a lot of the silly "ancient astronaut" claims, both in essays, and in the classic short story "Those Eyes" (available online here).

In short, Dr. Brin contends that given the "evidence" we've been presented, we can rule out any contact by intelligent alien life. They're generally described as acting in a fashion rude, uncouth, and more suited to a class of backward third-graders than a sophisticated intelligent society. ("A high-IQ vandal in my home is still a vandal!") And I believe the questions posed by Dr. Brin's mouthpiece in the story, Prof. Joe Perez, are quite valid. Take the carvings in the Nazca plains, for instance - what the frak kind of alien wants to make spacecraft landing zones that look like a kindergarten representation of a bird? No guidance systems, no landing lights, no straight lines worth considering, just a figure of a local life form clumsily scrawled upon the ground.

Religions might have caused someone to do that - religious faith built the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Cathedral at Chartres, after all - but aliens? Really?? Something capable of creating craft that can cross lightyears of space for a trivial cost (and the cost would have to have been trivial, for they did nothing to recoup their investment upon arrival), and that's the best they can do? I find the concept of a supernatural deity living both within and without the physical universe far easier to swallow than the idea of corporeal beings who are simultaneously so smart and so unutterably stupid.

Now, this is not to say that I deny intelligent life can exist anywhere else - given the sheer extravagance of the universe, it seems rather wasteful, at best, if we're all that's coming out of it - but I do regard as silly and naive the notion that anything out there has bothered to come here. What's so special about Earth, after all? It's just another ball of mud spinning around an extremely mediocre yellow star two-thirds of the way out from the center of an entirely unremarkable galaxy...

Has anyone here read the sumerian texts? pretty much making allusions to how the "gods" of their time traveled from another place to teach us things. There is a lot of cross cultural evidence for the nephillim as well. Native american myths where they talk about the ones who fell from the sky ..and an underground city. You ever noticed there are a lot of underground citys around the world?

Read some of the vedas from way back in the hindu myths and it basically talks about battles between spaceships lol. I tend to believe that maybe if angels were real they were just transdimensional aliens that use a wormhole in two parts of the earth..say like in the bermuda triangle and the other one. ..I know it sounds kinda wacky but hey is'nt that a material idea?

The thought is that ancient peoples found dinosaur bones and created dragon stories around them.
Ditto stories about giants.

100% Extra-terrestrials for me. Then again I don't follow any religion so...

I am studying biology at the moment to collect credits, and every college's first year biology courses will teach you that life on earth arose either from abiogenesis and further evolution OR somehow arrived on earth from space, whether it be cells frozen in a piece of space debris that landed here or somehow arrived by means of intelligently controlled crafts... maybe from other planets.

Very occasionally you hit someone whose theology would be perturbed if we encountered unquestionable extraterrestrial extrasystemic life even if unintelligent. You would have to rewrite a few books.

But it is a very poor science take in its stride a coelacanth or a mokelembembe, and a rather impoverished Christianity that boggles at one more aspect of creation currently hidden from us.

Well if the little green men ( or gray men, or whatever theyre spose to be) actually did land on the white house lawn tomorrow and demand a press conference with our leader- then that WOULD create a bit of a problem for the abrahamic faiths because it would show that something big got left out of Genisis.

I dont think it would be a fatal blow by any means, but the major faiths would need to do some backpedaling to accomidate that. So belief in aliens may not be a head on collision with religion but it is a bit of a fender bender.

But were angles really alien astronauts ( or 'interdimensional beings")? Or are UFO's really misplaced angel's halos?
Either way you're explaining one unknown with another unknown.