Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
eleventh and twelfth verses of Luke, Chapter 21, in which Jesus
talks about 'great signs from Heaven' - nothing like a UFO is
described - in the last days. Typically, Lindsey ignores verse 32 in
which Jesus makes it very clear he is talking about events in the
first, not the twentieth, century.
There is also a Christian tradition according to which
extraterrestrial life cannot exist. In Christian News for 23 May
1994, for example, W. Gary Crampton, Doctor of Theology, tells
us:
The Bible, either explicitly or implicitly, speaks to every area
of life; it never leaves us without an answer. The Bible
nowhere explicitly affirms or negates intelligent extraterrestrial
life. Implicitly, however, Scripture does deny the existence
of such beings, thus also negating the possibility of flying
saucers . . . Scripture views earth as the center of the universe
. . . According to Peter, a 'planet hopping' Savior is out
of the question. Here is an answer to intelligent life on other
planets. If there were such, who would redeem them?
Certainly not Christ . . . Experiences which are out of line
with the teachings of Scripture must always be renounced as
fallacious. The Bible has a monopoly on the truth.
But many other Christian sects - Roman Catholics, for example -
are completely open-minded, with no a priori objections to and no
insistence on the reality of aliens and UFOs.
In the early 1960s, I argued that the UFO stories were crafted
chiefly to satisfy religious longings. At a time when science has
complicated uncritical adherence to the old-time religions, an
alternative is proffered to the God hypothesis: dressed in scientific
jargon, their immense powers 'explained' by superficially scientific
terminology, the gods and demons of old come down from
heaven to haunt us, to offer prophetic visions, and to tantalize us
with visions of a more hopeful future: a space-age mystery religion
aborning.
The folklorist Thomas E. Bullard wrote in 1989 that
abduction reports sound like rewrites of older supernatural
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