The Catholic church answered this question ages ago. I assume the other major religions did too. It's really not concerning at all to the institution; the major problem would be with people who don't actually understand their own religion.
Granted, this would be a lot of people, but I think it'd be a midrange of "kinda religious, but not enough to dive in"-types who are mostly freaking out over the revelation.
So, how does the story go? Only earth is blessed by god, because Jesus crashed here, and all the alien races are toast because they didn’t have a chance to learn about Christ, Savior of the strange bipeds from Earth?
I’m sure they came up with an elaborate story how Jesus loves sentient mollusks from Alpha Centauri, but I hope most people are smart enough to realise how little sense it all makes. I for one am curious how this plays out, if I’m lucky enough to witness it.
Check out: "UFO, End Times Delusion" as an example of a fundie take on extra terrestrials. A bit old now, not sure if they've updated it, but it's the kind of stuff I was raised in in the 80s/90s.
tl;dr Humans were first and most important, but if you're omnipotent and building an ant farm, it's logical to provide a nearly infinite number of things to interest and enrich your creations. If there are other creatures, and they're given a rational soul, they were also made aware of God's existence.
At the end of the day, the Catholics (at least) don't believe they were given full knowledge of the universe at some arbitrary point in the past. Instead, we were plopped into it and expected to explore and understand it. This will require us to occasionally update our teachings - just like how scientists need to update their teachings when they discover they didn't understand something before.
It's unbelievably obnoxious to simply assume everyone who doesn't scoff at religion simply isn't "smart enough". You clearly haven't taken much time to understand the topic if you can't come up with even one good argument. Even Richard Dawkins is able to connect with religious logic to a degree.
Note that I didn’t refer to religion as a whole, but the combination of Catholicism and sentient alien life in particular. I am definitely able to sympathise with believing in a kind of architect giving it all a sense of meaning, even if I don’t share that notion. But desperate attempts of wringing a somewhat coherent argument out of texts written for a feudal society millennia ago? That’s just coping.
Oh, then sure, I won't argue with you there. It's up to you at that point to find the arguments convincing or not.
I think the idea of Imago Dei is actually the most believable part. I am absolutely convinced that we're the forerunners of this universe. The first scenario where a creation becomes aware of its creator - even if I'm imagining the wrong architect.
It would depend a lot on what the alien species was like.
If they go "oh yeah Religion, that's a quirk of your biology, don't worry you will outgrow it in time" then yeah, that's problematic.
If they go "Oh, you say that the savior Jesus Christ was a human? That answers one of our biggest questions. The story never made much sense before. Boy, those Angels must be pretty freaky looking for you then." then that's entirely different.
Maybe I'm not thinking this through clearly enough but isn't this "just fine" for the current administration? From their perspective what exactly is the downside to this?
Of course they’re fine with it. They pushed the policy. They’re enemies of truth and reality, journalism and reporting information is their natural enemy.
How likely is it that the end game becomes that we stop writing apps for actual human users and instead sites become massive walls of minified text against a black screen.
I was sceptical about this for factor seeing as it seemed like a gimmicky throwback to the early to mid 2000s.
But honestly, now that I've played around with Samsungs offerings I get it. Back in the day phones had quite a bit of personality, and Samsung really nailed that aspect.
I wonder how quickly the gunman will be found. I've always wondered if the authorities would ever be able to find someone who patterned themselves after a character like The Jackal.
I had a convo about law enforcement's tools with a California detective last month. He was very clear its only a question of resources, and if the federal gov't is motivated to find them, they will.
You know I’ve generally thought it’s is true. You WILL get caught. Then I wonder if the government knows who Satoshi is. I know he didn’t kill someone but I wonder if the resources exist to figure it out if they truly wanted.
"The government" is not a monolith. It is an organization staffed by people who have different opinions, motivations, goals, etc., and often work at cross purposes. It's entirely possible that some in the government know who Satoshi is and aren't telling others (especially higher-ups) about it.
I hope you're talking about the original The Jackal. That's a great movie that has fascinated me essentially because of the theme you've identified. A truly motivated, highly-intelligent person could commit horrendous acts without detection. So far, whoever committed this assassination has succeeded; but I suspect, there is simply too much surveillance in 2025 to get away with it.
edit: regarding the surveillance issue, wonder what the retention on google earth/maps logs is for the location of the shooting?
This is a feeling that definitely becomes more acute the older one gets.
Try shopping for toys for your kids today. Every time I'm with my 7 year old browsing the toy aisles I fondly remember my Tonka truck from when I was his age.
I outgrew it and it was still in perfect condition. My sons toys barely last a month.
PowerShell lends itself really well to writing cross-platform shell scripts that run the same everywhere you can boot up PowerShell 7+. It's origins in .NET scripting mean that some higher-level idioms were already common in PowerShell script writing even before cross-platform existed, for instance using `$pathINeed = Join-Path $basePath ../sub-folder-name` will handle path separators smartly rather than just trying to string math it.
It's object-oriented approach is nice to work with and provides some nice tools that contrast well with the Unix "everything is text" tooling approach. Anything with a JSON output, for instance, is really lovely to work with `ConvertFrom-Json` as PowerShell objects. (Similar to what you can do with `jq`, but "shell native".) Similarly with `ConvertTo-Json` for anything that takes JSON input, you can build complex PowerShell object structures and then easily pass them as JSON. (I also sometimes use `ConvertTo-Json` for REPL debugging.)
It's also nice that shell script parameter/argument parsing is standardized in PowerShell. I think it makes it easier to start new scripts from scratch. There's a lot of bashisms you can copy and paste to start a bash script, but PowerShell gives you a lot of power out of the box including auto-shorthands and basic usage documentation "for free" with its built-in parameter binding support.
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