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Are we ready to baptize extraterrestrials?

Amid all the trivia and superficiality of our modern life, there are times when a statement or a thought shakes us, not only for what is being said, but also for the possibilities that thought presents. In other words, sometimes we need a good jolt to escape from our intellectual sleepiness.

I am talking about something said last week by Dr. Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican’s astronomer and the curator of the Pope's meteorite collection. Speaking at the British Science Festival in Birmingham, he said he would be happy “to baptize an alien,” but “only if they asked.”

Consolmagno admitted there are very low chances of communicating with intelligence life outside Earth, due to the enormous task of finding intelligent life on our vast universe, and life able to communicate with us.

But, according to Consolmagno, perhaps there are intelligent aliens out there, that is, entities with the ability to love and to make their own decisions. “Any entity - no matter how many tentacles it has - has a soul,” he said.

However, Consolmagno said, even if those entities do exist, perhaps the dialogue with aliens will not begin in the United States, at least not among certain fundamentalist groups in this country. According to the astronomer, those groups practice a “bad theology” and have abandoned both science and basic traditional teachings.

Leaving aside all theological and doctrinal issues, I think we need to analyze the very important point Consolmagno is making: the common pattern of thought and behavior of fundamentalist (conservative) sectors in the United States would prevent the dialogue with intelligent beings from other places.

In other words (my words, not Consolmagno’s), if we doubt a being is intelligent just because his appearance is not like ours and he was born somewhere else, then, regardless of how intelligent that person is, no dialogue will be possible, because we will not recognize the ability of that person to love and to make his own decisions.

If we refuse to see the intelligence of the alien, and if therefore we can’t talk with him, the next step will be to create some kind of mechanism to control the arrival and presence of aliens among us.

So, what originally was a theoretical question about baptizing an alien, changes now to a practical and daily issue when we discover that the same mindset some sectors apply to “aliens” ( E.T.s) it is also applied to “aliens” (immigrants).

Perhaps that’s why “alien” means both “extraterrestrial” and “foreigner,” emphasizing that same paradigm of thinking is being used in both cases, the paradigm of not accepting “the others” as intelligent beings, but only seeing them as a threat or a something to be controlled.
From across the ocean and from a different religious tradition (different also from mine), Consolmagno unveils a dangerous mindset in certain sectors of the American society that refuse to talk not only with an multi-tentacular alien from other planet, but also with an alien with a different color from other country.

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