Will religion end on Mars?

economic times (India) ^ | 6/28/2008 | Mukul Sharma,

[Soliton]

For example, some people are already writing off most major religions which are based essentially on an Earth-centric model, as never being able to recover from such a crippling body blow. (The Bible makes no mention of other planets or life on other planets.)

[tumblindice]

“Martians”
As the little girl posited, there are unicorns because we have a name for them.
If they didn’t exist, why would we name them?

[John Leland 1789]

“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
"And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
“And God made two great lights; the greater light [Sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [Moon] to rule the night: he made the stars also.

[And around millions and millions of the stars He began planets spinning; upon some He put living creatures, and upon some He did not, just to eventually bend the brains of scientists He knew would come along who thought they were smarter than Him, and would want to get rid of any knowledge of Him.]

“And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
“And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
“And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.”

Genesis 1:14-19

No, finding an amoeba, or finding a bull elephant on Mars, would not rule God out in the least.

[Soliton]

Last time I checked, the moon and the sun were planets.

Check again

[Domandred]

I never assumed that God experiences time in a linear fashion. If you go back deep in my post history (I don’t wanna do it either) I’ve stated at least on two occasions that time as a linear construct is for man to understand and God exists outside that construct. We cannot fully comprehend the infinite. For our meager understanding of infinite time, we as mortal humans still function in a linear fashion.

[js1138]

Yes, Bruno got burned at the stake for saying, not only that the earth was not the immovable center of the universe, but that other stars had other planets with life and that God would have to send an ‘alien Jesus’ to those planets for their spiritual redemption.

Now that you say it that way, it does seem a bit odd that gazillions of planets would have Adams and Eves that behaved exactly the same way.

[AndrewC]

Apparently it is in India.

Well, then apparently it is a facet to be considered in any discussion of evolution. As to your question about a hypothetical Bible on Mars, I consider that along the lines of "if a frog had a glass ass ...".

[AndrewC]

When biogenesis has some good things to add to evolution, it will be incorporated into evolution. In the meantime, evolution is about change and the origin of diversity.

That sounds like something Obama invented.

[Soliton]

And God made two great lights; the greater light [Sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [Moon] to rule the night: he made the stars also.

To a primitive person 4 or 5 millinia ago, the sun and the moon would appear as "lights". There is no suggestion that they thought of them as different things, one a nuclear furnace and one a lump of gray rock reflecting the light from that furnace. There was one light and one mirror. They had no idea that they were spheres or that they were anything but bright spots in the nightime (Three Dog Night). That they were "lights" was easily observable with the naked eye.

[wendy1946]

The original images from the Cydonia region in 76 were blurry, taken from high altitude. More recent images are a whole lot clearer:

Any sort of a google image search on 'cydonia' or 'face on mars' or 'd&m pyramid' will turn up more of this stuff than you can use.

[Soliton]

I can see how thought provoking it all is to you -- you don't really care enough to pay attention to who authors your posts

I didn't know the two of you were close enough for pet names, sorry

[Soliton]

What is certain is that not every major interpretation of the bible holds that aliens would need salvation.

But this would make us second class galactic citizens rather than them. Why should you and I need salvation from something someone else did?

[NavyCanDo]

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.

That one simple sentence says so much for those of us who believe in God the Creator. “Heavens” as in the 3 heavens - the terrestrial heaven that gives us our life giving oxygen and rain clouds, the galactic heaven that contains the planets, the stars, and from what we can tell, a space that goes on forever. And then there is the Heaven that is the place where God dwells. Each of these Heavens is greater and holds more wonders than the one before it. Should any Christian be troubled by the discovery of some sort of life on these creations of God? I think not.

[RightWhale]

Some channels have been found in orbiter photography, but none where the old drawings showed. We’ll probably find Mars to be vastly more varied than anybody a century ago suspected, and nothing like what they imagined.

This website http://www.marsdaily.com/ posts Mars lander updates nearly every day now.

This website http://www.marsdaily.com/ posts some blue-red stereo images of the trenches being dug.

[Soliton]

Q. What are the three heavens? Are there levels of Heaven?

A. The standard King James Version says,

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
However, most modern translations correctly refer to heavens, plural.

Jeremiah 4:25 describes one heaven:

“I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled.”
Birds fly within the earth’s atmosphere. Therefore one heaven is the air we breathe. Revelation 19:17 substantiates this by stating,

“I saw an angel standing in the sun, and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come.”
Genesis 22:17 says,

“In blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply your seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore.”
So it seems there’s a second heaven where the stars and planets are, the part of the universe we call space.

Psalm 11:4 says,

“The Lord is in his holy temple: the Lord’s throne is in heaven . . . “
but it doesn’t reveal which heaven.

It can’t be the first heaven, since God does not yet dwell with mankind. Could it be the second heaven, space?

Deuteronomy 10:14 tells us:

“Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord’s your God; the earth also, with all that therein is.”
Job 22:12 sheds a little more light on the subject.

“Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are!”
This suggests the height of heaven is even higher than the stars, thus indicating yet another heaven.

But it’s Paul who truly reveals a third heaven. In 2 Corinthians 12:2 he wrote,

“I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knows;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.”
Verse 4 refers to paradise, and Revelation 2:7 identifies it as the paradise of God.

So the three heavens are:

The atmosphere in which we live.
Space.
God’s throne.
Answer Given By: Leslie A Turvey

[kalee]

bookmark for later

[NavyCanDo]

LOL. When we first landed on the Moon, I was a young boy with hormones working overtime. The discovery of Moon-Maidens would of surely been all the proof I needed that there was a God.

[Soliton]

When we first landed on the Moon, I was a young boy with hormones

Me too! I read Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian series because the cover art was so hot!

[js1138]

That sounds like something Obama invented.

All science so far.

[dragnet2]

I've always like this image

Clouds above the rim of "Endurance Crater" in this image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. These clouds occur in a region of strong vertical shear. The cloud particles (ice in this martian case) fall out, and get dragged along away from the location where they originally condensed, forming characteristic streamers. Opportunity took this picture with its navigation camera during the rover's 269th martian day (Oct. 26, 2004). (NASA/JPL)

[John Leland 1789]

Five millennia ago would put us in Genesis chapter 11, around the time of the Tower of Babel. I believe that there were people there who actually knew what the stars were.

Adam walked and talked with the Creator.

“Lord, what are those lights in the sky?”

“Well, let me tell you, Adam. On the fourth day, two days before I made you and the Misses, I created a big ball of burning gases and set it at just the right distance from the earth — any closer and you’d burn up, and any further and you’d freeze to death. I was thinking about you, Adam. And then I knew that you and your sweetheart would need something to gawk at in the night, sitting on the lawn by that Tigris River, so I put another ball of dirt up there that could reflect the light of the sun as the earth rotated, putting you on the opposite side. Ain’t it romantic, Adam?”

He passed that knowledge to his children (perhaps more than a hundred of them in 930 years), and to his grandchildren, and to his great grandchildren, and to his great-greatgrandchildren, and to his great-great-great grandchildren, and so forth (930 years old!) And who told their children.

The knowledge of God wasn’t passed by men who lived only 70 or 80 years, but by men who lived almost a millennia in good health (before the flood), and saw a dozen or more generations of their own seed come along.

Adam was probably still alive within 120 years from Noah getting on the ark.

And I believe Noah knew what a star was, and taught Shem, Ham, and Jepeth, and his grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and great-greatgrandchildren, ect.

Noah’s son, Shem, was probably still living in Abraham’s day.