STONE TABLE: GOD'S SIMPLE PLAN FOR EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS

When I wasn't developing my gymnastics abilities, I was spending the majority of my tween years philosophizing to no good end.

-on the sidewalk

-in the grocery store

-at work

-with the cashier

-with the policeman

-with my Yugoslavian landlord

-with a total stranger on the sidewalk

-did I say at work already?

-on the phone

-while swinging on the parallel bars

-while watching movies

-while taking the trash out

Philosophizing never made me any money, but it was one of those enjoyable ventures into which I didn't mind investing every asset, including precious brain cells.

During college I actually had encouragement from an eclectic brotherhood of philosophizers who, to be quite honest, were more interested in the rhetoric of presentation than in the discovery of actual answers to the problems we posed to ourselves and others. Topics ranged from ethics to politics to education, to sociological concerns, each framed within an ethereally theological construct we found elusive enough to differentiate a myriad of original-sounding topics, plagiarizing the brilliant parts and bumbling through the disjointed ones.

Of all the vital subjects we covered, however, we never talked about aliens.

I have wondered about aliens for over a decade at least (My children aren't afraid of monsters at night. They're afraid of aliens. They don't dream about monsters. They dream about aliens). The existence of aliens has been taken more seriously since well before Spielberg's Close Encounters (1977... I actually saw this movie in the movie theater in Germany. I had to have been 5 or 6) and ET (1982).

I've actually had my own thoughts about aliens, chief of all being:

If you had the opportunity to evangelize an extra-terrestrial life-form, how would you go about it?

The first relevant question would be To what end would you evangelize them?

I mean, what do you know about them to even have a need to evangelize them?

-Do you intend to colonize said alien race to the end that you diminish their power (very much like the ancient Pharaoh did to the Israelites)?

-Do you intend to build within them a subservient spirit to the end that compliance to New Testament platitudes you pick and choose to preach render them intellectually and functionally impotent to fend for themselves?

-Do you intend to provide an ideological superstructure to the end that each successive generation of aliens, being subject to your elitist cultural prototype, becomes more and more isolated from their own alien race (after all, there is nothing even remotely redeemable about the larger alien culture) to the end that they have no culture of their own and must by the sheer gravity of your culture stacked against them become (at best) inferior replicas of your very own?

Maybe their language is unacceptable, having all of the linguistic and world-view trappings of an "other-planetary" culture you can't stomach?

So you teach them King James English to the end that the salvific, cultural transfer has a chance to catch and to endure, transforming alien terms like "klj^doqp", which is derivative of "kljdq^yrp" which refers to the "Great Enlightenment" (a "supernova") of the XVI epoch of the rule of the W^/vh in which sanctions were put upon the filthy practice of Gl^n (which is too inappropriate a topic for me to discuss in this blog. That term, by the way, was the closest the Jupillian people could associate with the word "transgression." But the powers that be deemed the term etymologically inferior to the word "sin" which... add an "^"... roughly means "tickle." So the Juppilian, misunderstanding of an injunction associated with that term, outlawed any sort of playful touch, and involuntary itches carried with them the equivalent stigma that "fornication" has in our culture).

What mode of evangelism would you use?

-Physical force? Probably not, because the Juppilians each have five arms and a diaphragm that pumps like a pipe organ.

-Intellectual force? Each single brain neuron has a baseline functionality on par with the MacBook Air.

No, what you would need to do is to create a default switch that leaves them helpless for a mere three hours a week, whereby you could upload viruses onto their "hard-drives" (I know Macs don't "have" viruses, but bear with me) that would systematically render them less and less logically competent. Better yet, why not call that three hours a week "church"?

Of course, it's "tinkering." But it's for the glory of God, so who cares?

Of course, the mode cannot appear to be anything less than normal custom that needs no apology or explanation... no legitimate story. This is what everyone does should be enough, and if they object we could even say This is what ^-^- taught us to do. Combined with the ethically spurious deprogramming, that might have a chance to work.

Before long, we have a nice, fat document we call "God's Simple Plan of Salvation for Aliens" that any alien (if the alien really read it and wholeheartedly followed its dictates) would find itself becoming a fine specimen like ourselves.

But isn't that the big problem in the first place? The "Plan" we have for them is not the same "Plan" we have for ourselves. In fact, their "Plan" is way too constricting than our own. The "Plan" we have for ourselves is less dogmatic and more open-ended, less specific and more ambiguous, less angry and more merciful than theirs.

Oh, but there is a further problem. We make no correlation between the alien and ourselves. Probably because we see no similarity between the alien and ourselves. In fact, it takes everything in us not to react in genuine horror when we come face to face with them. We are sentient bigots and even privately refer to said alien people-group in question as "Juppies" (But only when they aren't listening).

All of that theory. All of that conniving. All of that translating. All of that missionarying. And to what end?

We don't know. Not really.

All we know is that we can't let a race of aliens have the edge on us. It would mean the end of life as we know it. Even if that life is inferior, it is familiar. It is ours. It is comfortable.

So if stopping the aliens means infusing their culture with the virus of an inferior Gospel, then let it be, amen. Notwithstanding. If a race of aliens truly exists, wouldn't its deepest need be the same as our very own?

Look at it even more carefully, and we might realize that we didn't consider what exactly it was about the aliens that needed saving.

You know why?

Probably because we each do not really know what it is in each of us that needs saving. After all, who wouldn't want to be like me?

Of course, none of these steps, well-intentioned or not, would EVER work unless we want to replicate the horrors of colonialism. After my second trip from China, a very well-meaning and religiously devoted person asked me about my trip. When I explained how I went to a Chinese church out of interest, he quickly followed the heels of my story with the harshest of prejudice in a simple statement the equivalent of...

But they can't be teaching the true Gospel. Chinese are Communists.

And that sums up the most patronizing and damaging of Christian evangelism...

... that before an individual can be a bonafide believer of any use they must FIRST be American or conservative or Reformed or exposed to medieval literature or infused with a smattering of MacArthur or Piper or Schaeffer or owner of the KJV or ESV or exposed to some rare and hard-to-come-by Christian curriculum or any other list of regulations a culture hails as "baseline."

When the ONLY prerequisite for an alien to become a believer is that the alien...

... first be an alien.