Curse of the Day:
• May your tomatoes be black and dry inside.

• Remember the good old days when you could go to some jungle-infested third world country and buy all the 14 y/o virgins (actually skinny, smack-addicted, 19 y/o whores) you wanted for more the cost of a good bottle of wine back home, bareback them all from here to Sunday, and come out of it with nothing more than some scratches and maybe a light case of the clap?  Me neither, but it would seem those days are long gone...

• The Who are providing further proof, if any were needed, that bassists and drummers are entirely expendable.  Any idiot can play the instruments that keep the beat, it would seem. The band was already on a replacement drummer (Ringo's son.  Really.) and their bassist just dropped dead 4 days ago.  So what do they do?  Open up a tour in front of 18,000 people and rock out.  My god they must really need the money; I guess those royalties for 20 year old albums aren't all that hot.

• Guy climbs over fences, ignores warning signs, and dies standing over a blowhole.  Needless to say, he was 18.

• The problem with carrying no a teasing session with someone underage is that sooner or later they'll blab to mommy, and ruin everything?

repare for a lot of words.  This was initially the "Flux Says No" item of the day.  Which means it was the one popular news item that I found dumb, and only commented on here to point out that it was dumb. You know, the daily feature I do twice a week. From that initial concept it blew up into a big philosophical speculation about alien religions, or lack thereof.  First the dumb news item.

Anyway, the only thing less convincing than the actual reports of cattle mutilations is the new "official" explanation for them.

Recent mutilations of cattle and horses in the Argentine countryside were the work of rodents, scientists said on Monday, not ritualistic slayings by extraterrestrials or vampires as some farmers feared.

Argentina's national food and animal health inspection service Senasa sent its own "X-Files" scientists to the remote plains to look into the deaths of farm animals found mutilated and drained of blood. Frightened farmers claimed to have seen bright lights and UFOs in the area where the deaths occurred.

But Senasa officials said the dozens of livestock whose genitals, tongues and other organs appeared to have been removed with surgical precision were victims of rodents, foxes or other animals. Senasa said the farm animals likely died from common infections and wild animals later mutilated the corpses.

This is fishy on numerous levels.  I regard all UFO sightings, especially ones of the "strange lights" variety, as little better than bigfoot sightings; 80% hoaxes, 19.9% confused people, .1% unexplained.  And when you throw in mysteriously mangled corpses, it just complicates things.  True, you've got some actual physical evidence, but evidence that's so easily falsified.  The explanation sucks also though.  Farmers have seen dead, scavenger-gnawed animals their whole lives; why wouldn't they be able to recognize it in this instance?

The whole concept of aliens mutilating cattle is so dumb anyway, I wonder where it came from.  So imagine you're an astronaut, and you travel to another world, where the people are technologically advanced, but don't have interstellar flight yet.  You're landing and exploring, etc, but trying to keep from being seen. What possible reason would you have to land, mutilate livestock, and then leave the evidence around?  I mean what could the possible scientific benefits be?  If you wanted to experiment on an animal, you'd take it with you, and have a lab on your ship, not out in some field somewhere.  And if you were trying to land in secret, wouldn't you turn off the ship lights?

If this is really happening, I.E. it's not just animals and superstitious farmers, I'd say they're doing it themselves for some sort of insurance scam, or whip up interest in something for a financial reason, or there are local pranksters. Maybe someone with a vendetta against a farmer, and wanting to hurt him by killing his animals, and clever enough to disguise it somewhat by making it look supernatural, to throw off suspicion?

On another alien topic, I was watching a PBS show tonight about Native Americans near Seattle, on Bainbridge Island.  The show was about fireworks, mostly, but had a bit of their history.  As recently as the 1930's, the US government came in and moved every one of them away from their original villages on the coast, and stuck them on new reservations.  Not only that, but all of their children were forced to attend distant boarding schools, they were banned from practicing any religion other than Christianity, and speaking any language other than English.  America, land of the free!

The ironic part was that some of them are now devout Christians, going on and on about biblical passages and praying over every box of fireworks, etc. Given their shotgun introduction to the Bible, I'd think they would drop the white man's religion now that they have the option, and go back to their heathen nature spirit worship, or be Buddhists, or Atheists, or something.  Anything but Jesus, considering how they were forced to worship it.

While cutting up veggies for the pasta stir fry I had for dinner, I was pondering the history of conquered peoples, and their usual forced adoption of the religion of the conquerors. And how they tend to persist in worshiping it even decades or centuries later.  See Mexico and all of Central and South America, for example.

In goofy Sci Fi (like on South Park or the Simpsons) Christians are always trying to spread their gospel to aliens, who seem surprised and vulnerable to it.  How would it really be though?  In the history of humanity, the conquering tribe's religion is almost always imposed on the weaker tribe, usually under threat of death, and over time it is adopted long term. Also, the tribe with greater technology always seems to win any meeting, and their ideas, technologies, religions, etc always seem to triumph in the end.

So would this happen when/if we encountered aliens?  Would they come to dominate the earth, and force us to worship their tentacled gods?  Would they be crusaders, come to civilize us and cure us of our heathen ways?  Possibly, but I certainly hope not.

I subscribe more to the Star Trek concept, of enlightened, scientific, rational aliens, (they're Star Trek, we're the primitive planet) who would be past the Age of Religions in their societal development, and would probably be bemused by how many earthlings follow their primitive superstitions.  In that light, it seems an amazing act of hubris to assume they'd have any tolerance for earth religions, much less want to follow them. 

I can't see any way objective observers (which Aliens would be, coming from outside of our culture) wouldn't see all earth religions for what they are; the philosophical constructs of ancient man, passed down over time and (inexplicably) still followed by large percentages of the population, even when science has shown that virtually everything in the various holy books is clearly myth and fable, rather than fact.

Our belief systems would seem so pathetically superstitious and primitive that no higher life form could possibly have any use for them, other than as anthropological artifacts to analyze.  Right?  Did the conquering Spaniards start worshiping Quetzalcoatl and painting themselves with jaguar spots when they encountered the Aztecs and Mayans?  Not that I know of.

I sort of assume that aliens wouldn't have any religion, or at least no primitive one.  Can we expect new religions to appear on earth, ones based in science and modern thought?  Or will existing ones just continue to be modified and amended to keep up with the times?  There are new religions on earth, they're just called "cults" since they have a lot fewer members and are new.  Mormons were a cult 100 years ago, but now there are tens of millions of them world wide.

None of the well-known religions or cults are really "modern" though.  Scientology is recent, but it's just absurdly kooky, full of magical powers and idiotically silly creation stories, so it's got no real future. Will there be a truly modern religion, or does the whole concept of modern/scientific exclude religion, which is by definition blind belief and adherence to written "truths", regardless of whether or not they are actually true?

Surveys I've seen say that upwards of 90% of top scientists are atheists, and more like 95% of really top scholars in their fields are godless.  The more you know, the less you feel a need to believe in magic, is how I decipher the evidence.

That was true for me; I wasn't real religious, but was certainly at least agnostic, with various superstitious tendencies, when I was a teenager.  Then in my first couple of years of college I took classes in Astronomy, Physical Geography, World Mythologies, and Philosophy, and putting together the new knowledge I had, I just couldn't keep believing in anything magical or supernatural or religious.  I found the mythology classes the most instructive; when you learn that virtually every story in the Bible is based on earlier legends and myths from other cultures and their religions, it pretty well removes any chance you'll take any of the Biblical tales literally.  The fact that the whole concept of dualism (Satan vs. God) wasn't introduced into Christianity until long after the Old Testament writings, and was obviously added in after the ancient Hebrews were exposed to dualism from Babylonian religions (among others) was really an eye-opener.

Anyway, my point is that I can't see humans not continuing to grow less superstitious/religious over time, especially once all our existence is owed to science and technology (as it will be in space travel).  But of course I project my own life experiences onto my world view, and what I expect others to believe as they learn more.  Plenty of well-educated people know as much as I do about things, and still believe in God.  I'm not sure how they reconcile things w/o just turning their backs on all logical analysis, but they seem to manage it somehow.

So I guess aliens would likely be rationalists and highly-evolved in their belief systems, but there's no guarantee they'd all be atheists.  After all, it's entirely possible that there is some magical creator thing for the universe, a being that's knowable and detectible with sufficient technology.  Humans can't do it yet, obviously, but perhaps alien civilizations could, and they'd introduce us to their method?  Just because none of the religions practiced on earth are more than updated interpretations of ancient superstitions doesn't mean there's not a true worshipful type of religion possible in the universe.

Though I tend to doubt it...