The discovery of alien life could turbocharge religious division and hatred, the UK’s leading UFO expert has warned.
I think this idea is pretty legitimate. People in first world societies, with generally decent minimal education, will mostly be ok, maybe. We forget that a majority of the 8 billion people on the planet live in 3rd world conditions, significantly less or no education, and lots of severe religious indoctrination. There are still countries that execute people for apostasy.
We’re not certain it would be all bad, but it’s not a topic to dismiss. The possibility of societal disruption due to real disclosure resulting in any disruption to say, the economy, for whatever reasons, could be a reason the powers that be don’t want to disclose. Maybe the risk is too great in their view. Just speculating obviously.
Regarding religious acceptance, I’ve always felt that the idea of extraterrestrial or non-human intelligence would mesh well with the major religions. I think a lot off devout people would morph the idea of non-human intelligence to match that of angels or messengers. You can already get hints of that from some of the Republicans pushing for disclosure. Whether or not they’re right in their interpretation, the overall concept of NHI would be accepted by a lot of people.
The biggest part of a controlled disclosure is preventing political conflicts and keeping the economy stable. If there has been decades of UAP/NHI recovery and research, then it could create tension within and amongst countries. We’re always seeing tension grow between Congress and the DoD over the issue and public disclosure would just fuel distrust.
Any reveal of research and the companies involved could make for major fluctuations in the stock market. On top of that, I’d imagine there would be an onslaught of lawsuits with those companies to make research and patents public.
I wouldn’t expect a basic disclosure to be catastrophic to the public, but it would be to the government and contractors. The hold up at this point is likely those involved trying to cover their asses to limit the consequences for themselves.
The idea that not only is a specific religion is not the “chosen” religion, but human beings as a species aren’t even a “chosen” species, would be brain breaking for a lot of people.
What if the aliens have their own competing faith which gains human adherents?
You can see why TBTB are keeping a lid on this.
Similarly, what if a far more advanced species is completely absent of all superstitious/religious type of thinking, considering it to be an aberration? So they would consider us extremely archaic and infected with this poison of the mind. If we started communicating with them, naturally huge portions of the population would want to ask them religious based questions, and there response could be “this is all nonsense, time to evolve from this erroneous way of thinking”, or something.
This speculation adds more fuel to the idea of preventing disclosure. A lot of religious cultures would go apeshit.
It definitely would depend on what disclosure entails. I believe just disclosing the existence of and government engagement with a non-human intelligence could be easy to embrace or shrug off for most. However, introducing details of their culture or beliefs would redefine a lot of people’s ideologies. Collectively, humans never fare well with introducing new culture into their lives. And, if there comes a day that we publicly engage a non-human intelligence then we’ll be facing a range of new social and psychological conflicts.
Everything always seems to circle back to the idea that keeping people in ignorance is better because they’re too uneducated or stupid to understand. I just don’t buy it.
