Religion has become highly politicized in Syria, which has compelled religious figures to think about expanding beyond the specific networks to which they belong and try developing a more nationwide vision for Islam’s role in Syria. But writing code from scratch, while more cumbersome, usually results in a finer, more customized product. Blessings are said while someone lights the candles from left to right. There is another distinction about belief in nonhuman extraterrestrial intelligence, or UFO inhabitants, that makes it distinct from the types of religions with which we are most familiar. This tracks pretty closely with belief in God, and if Pasulka is right, that’s not an accident. Here we have people who are actual scientists, like Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA, who are willing to go on TV and basically make announcements like, “We are going to find extraterrestrial life.” Now, she’s not exactly talking about intelligent extraterrestrial life, but that’s not how many people interpret her.

I don’t quite believe that there are extraterrestrials. What’s strange today is that these scientists don’t really talk to each other the way they did in, say, the 1970s. Now they’re much more compartmentalized and worried about attracting too much attention or having their research distorted, so they work in the shadows and mostly independently. The key point is that these various forms of religion-based conflict drivers are not limited to religious groups, but are linked to much wider bases in society. According to Sibongile Nxumalo, the Christian missionaries that ignored or misconstrued “the positive aspects of traditional beliefs, customs and institutions of Swazi society” have largely been unsuccessful. To contribute to curbing the religious violence in this conflict, several interventions can be considered: interfaith dialogue; the remembrance of past fruitful cooperation between Jews and Muslims, ever since the seventh century; and focusing on religious texts asserting positive and tolerant religious values, and reinforcing these values in educational systems on both sides. Since journalists Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal have published two articles in the New York Times, one in December 2017, and the second one last week, focusing on the military’s involvement in programs associated with UFOs and materials of UFOs, there has been a lot of public interest in the subject, even among my colleagues who used to scoff at the notion.

Individuals may realize their humanity and become one with Heaven through the contemplation of this order. Repeat that process often enough and the paper may not have the money to continue publication. Ideologically, links with the wider society are established by trying to radicalize elements that have this potential, either due to natural tendencies toward perceived communal self-defense, or to the superficial knowledge of their religions. For example, extremists would use an isolated incident of violence against the Jewish community to justify retaliation by their wider society. Uh, er, use your imagination. In this way religion, for Kant, was a matter of practical reason, concerned with what people ought to do, rather than of theoretical reason, concerned with what people have good reason to think is true (see below Religion and morality). What is it about extraterrestrials that captivates so many people? According to Diana Pasulka, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the new book American Cosmic, belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials is becoming a kind of religion – and it isn’t nearly as fringe as you might think. On the surface, it’s a book about the popularity of belief in aliens, but it’s really a deep look at how myths and religions are created in the first place and how human beings deal with unexplainable experiences.

We’ll definitely get into the religious parallels, but first I want to clear up some misconceptions about the nature of these beliefs and the people behind them. Frankly, I was very suspicious of them at first and didn’t want to engage. I didn’t expect to confront this when I started my book. This summary only gets you through about one-half of the book of Daniel in the Bible. In fact, I almost stopped my book a number of times because I thought it was so odd. They share elements that go back to the 4th century BCE and to the prehistoric culture of China, such as the School of Yin and Yang and the thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi. I thought I was going to interview people who just saw these things and I was going to basically say, well, you know, this is the new structure for belief in aliens and UFOs. Her book isn’t so much about the truth of UFOs or aliens as it is about what the appeal of belief in those things says about our culture and the shifting roles of religion and technology in it. It’s a great time to believe in aliens. Yeah. And it’s also not very accessible to anyone who’s not an academic.