Man Seeks God by Eric Weiner

Author:Eric Weiner [Weiner, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: man_seeks_god_
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2011-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

I meet John, who strikes me as exceedingly normal. He owns his own consulting business and does a lot of work for the State Department. He has not yet “taken the transmission,” but I can see that he is drawn to the Raëlians. I wonder: How can someone so seemingly normal join a movement like this?

I want to talk to John, but think it is best to do so off campus, away from Raëlian eyes. We agree to meet for lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant. It’s a warm day, so we sit outside and each order a Corona. The waitress brings a basket of tortilla chips and a tub of salsa the size of a small swimming pool.

I’m not sure how to broach the subject. What I want to say is this: “John, you seem like a normal guy. Why are you becoming Raëlian? Do you really believe all of this Elohim nonsense?” That seems too confrontational, so instead I ask John to tell me about his childhood.

He grew up in rural Virginia, horse country. He had a happy childhood, he says, and I practically choke on my salsa. A happy childhood? Sure, I knew such a thing existed, in theory, much like life on other planets, but I’ve never met anyone who described their childhood as happy, at least without a boatload of qualifiers, as in “a relatively happy childhood,” or “a happy childhood, given the circumstances.”

John and his happy family went to church three times a week. The preacher was a devoted man, prone to fiery sermons. “Jesus Christ!” he would yell, but young John misheard him; he thought he was yelling “Jesus crashed!” That image seared itself into John’s young mind: Jesus in a spacecraft, wearing a white space suit and crashing to earth. Then one day the church held a Nativity play. They dressed up John as a shepherd and gave him a doll to hold. It’s baby Jesus, they told him. No, said John, it can’t be. Jesus crashed. In a spaceship.

That’s when they called John’s parents, who took him home and set him straight on Christian theology. From then on, John toed the party line, but still, the seed was sown: God came from outer space.

Actually, it’s not so far-fetched. Religion and outer space have long been intertwined. Nearly all of the early polytheistic faiths, from Africa to Australia, included a powerful “spirit of the sky” or “sky god.” In fact, one of the meanings of anthropos, human being, is “to look up.” And so we do: at the heavenly bodies, at God Himself.

In the twilight of his brilliant career, Carl Jung wrote a little-known book about the UFO phenomenon called Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. On the question of the existence of extra-terrestrials, Jung remained agnostic (or perhaps Confusionist), but he was clearly fascinated by the outbreak of UFO sightings and their psychic significance. Jung concluded that UFOs represent a religious impulse. The aliens are “technological angels” who have come to save us from ourselves.

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