Alien!

And, as C.S. Lewis noted, religion survived Copernicus, as well as Darwin and Freud.

But what would be the reaction of the ordinary human population, were visitors from another planet to make themselves known? Remember the ‘Cargo Cult’ of the 1940’s and 50’s in Papua and some Pacific Islands.

You can guess what would happen by looking at the racial problems we have already. There would be the usual growling conversations in hotels and the like, such as, “I don’t want the little purple so-and-so’s living next door to me!” or “I’ve got nothing against them, some of them are my best friends, but…” and “Well, I’m sure they are very nice people, but would you want your child to mind-meld and co-create with one?”

It would not be long before the civil unrest started, either. If you thought that the reaction to the ‘boat people’ is bad, can you imagine the reaction that orange and green star-ship refugees from the planet “%@&^%#*” would cause!

As Spiritualists, some of us already know that there are, indeed, other intelligences “out there” and Mediumship or Trance Mediumship may well be the only way that our race will ever have to contact these other intelligences. Does that make us any the less loved by the Great Spirit? Of course not. Rabbi Norman Lamm, of New York’s Yeshiva University said that a God who could look after a billion of us could easily look after 10 billion times that number, without necessarily affecting our unique “spiritual dignity”.

As we welcome and embrace the different races on our own Earth, we should welcome the other races scattered throughout the universe: have they not been created in the “image of God”, no matter what their physical form. They too, have souls as immortal as ours; they too, return to the Spirit World when their corporeal bodies cease to function; and they, too, know of the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of His Creatures, and the continual existence of the soul.