EXO-CATHEDRA: THE SECOND INCARNATION

There are still many people that believe that it is a great leap against common sense to believe that somewhere out there in vast reaches of the cosmos is life. The idea that we are alone in the universe is a geocentric belief that has come and gone for nearly 2000 years and it appears that every millennia brings with it all sorts of ideas about what is out there and what it means to human kind if we discover that we are not alone.

Regardless of the popular fiction, I have discovered that the very idea of deifying beings that may live in the heavens is not as contemporary as one might think. In fact, these ideas have evolved over two and a half millennia and the idea that aliens are gods or that God or “the gods” are simply extra-terrestrials may be the very basis for our religious faith.

I know that it may be a bit of cosmic blasphemy to admit that this is the case and to admit that God or the Father that lives in heaven is really an extra-terrestrial entity – if only for the sole reason that he does not live on the earth, but dwells in some nebulous heavenly domain that no one can even pinpoint in any dogma.

There is also the overwhelming belief that the extra-terrestrial father will someday return and, apart from apocalyptic writings in biblical texts, the return is often accompanied by catastrophic events that change the way we see our humanity.

For thousands of years the Catholic Church has guarded the secret of God or where God may be in the cosmos and has, up until now, not given any official announcement about the reality of extra-terrestrials and they most certainly have not equated them with being godlike. However, the secret may soon be revealed that the extra-terrestrial questions can be answered not only from the bible, but from ancient texts that also give a rich history of interaction with “gods” or beings that come down from heaven.

So far, unofficial pronouncements have recently come from respected sources connected to the Vatican. Rev. George Coyne, director of the Vatican Astronomic Observatory, considers the possibility of extra-terrestrials an “exciting prospect, which must be treated with caution.”

Rev. Christopher Corbally, S.J., another astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, believes that if we discover the existence of extra-terrestrials it will entail an expansion of the Catholic theology. He admits that “while Christ is the First and the Last Word (the Alpha and the Omega) spoken to humanity, he is not necessarily the only word spoken to the whole universe.”

Thomas O’Meara, O.P., professor of theology at Notre Dame, argues that “[t]he history of sin and salvation recorded in the two testaments of the Bible is not a history of the universe; it is a particular religious history on one planet.” For O’Meara, “the central importance of Jesus for us does not necessarily imply anything about other races on other planets. Believers must be prepared for a galactic horizon, even for further Incarnation.”

So this begs the question: Is this a gradual admission that the geocentric position of the church is now a thing of the past? Would a further incarnation mean that we will most definitely see the proof needed to open up to another doctrine, another dogma, and that this will be the next step in our ability to understand where we belong in the universe?

Could the second coming be literally a second incarnation?

According to a Catholic studies overview by Benjamin D. Wiker, the idea of aliens and their affairs with mankind arose more than 2,000 years ago among the ancient atomists (Democritus, but especially Epicurus and Lucretius) as part of an overall philosophical argument, rooted not in evidence but in the desire to rid the world of religion:

“According to Epicurus and Lucretius, belief that the gods interfere in human affairs was the root of all evil, causing human beings to engage in all manner of vile and foolish activities from war to child sacrifice. In Lucretius’s famous words (which 17 centuries later were to become a favorite taunt of the anti-Christian elements of the Enlightenment), “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum” (Only religion was able to persuade men of [such] evil things).

The Epicurean solution? A rather modern-sounding one: Eliminate religion by embracing a materialist view of the universe. The atomists got rid of the need for a divine creator of nature by asserting that everything in the universe came into being as a result of the chance jostling of brute matter (a.k.a., atoms). Because the number of atoms in a limitless universe is infinite, the random motion of the atoms must have produced a “plurality of worlds.” As Lucretius declared in On the Nature of the Universe, if “the purposeless congregation and coalescence of atoms” brought about all living things in our world — plants, people, and everything in between — then certainly “in other regions there are other earths and various tribes of men and breeds of beasts.”

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, once commented “As the human race moves into adolescence and adulthood, it can no longer afford to guide its affairs via those simple myths. Our human ancestors thought long and hard on who and what they were and came up with the best explanations they could make. The frightening thing is that we–at the end of the 20th century — are still hanging on to those explanations, which date back to our stone age. I think we need a more fruitful way to analyze these questions. We need exciting philosophical thought.”

From the simplest metaphor of the apple being consumed, to the apple falling on the head of Isaac Newton, to the Apple computer, man has gained his ideas though an intervention that can be either preplanned or accidental. The new meme that seems to be used today is the Promethean “New Dawn” or “New Age” of enlightenment. In this “New Age” we will see man’s potential as a god or a new relationship with gods of this earth and not of this earth. Therefore, it is vital that the religions of the world reopen the dialogue about the true origins of a father or mother of creation that may reside in the cosmos or, to use the romantic vernacular, “heaven.”

The metaphor of the UFO, the alien, the conspiracy, and the final possession or surrender of earth and its inhabitants is slowly replacing the chariot of fire, the angel, evil, and the final judgment and rapture of the faithful into the presence of God.

more here: http://www.groundzeromedia.org/exo-cathedra-the-second-incarnation/