theblackdostoyevsky

If aliens arrived tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d ask them?

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An “alien” is a word unwitting human beings use to describe living beings that they do not understand or identify with. Historically, it has been used to describe foreigners or immigrants from other countries who have customs and traditions that different from our own. We say that their ways are “alien” to us as if our ways ought to, somehow, be “native” to them. The concept of culture belies tribal alienation, one from another, and man’s history of violence is predicated on this fear of the stranger.

Cain killed Abel because Abel’s knowledge of what to offer God was “alien” to his own. Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth the Elder, “alienated” themselves from each other as they migrated from Turkey to overspread the earth. God “alienated” mankind from each other when he confused their languages at Babel. He also “alienated” Shem’s children from the sons of Japheth and Ham, “alienating” Abraham specifically, and then Isaac, and then Jacob, calling the Messiah, Jesus, from their lineage. Jesus was, in fact, the most “alienated” human being who ever lived.

Nonetheless, Medo-Persian were alienated from Babylonians, Greeks from Medo-Persians, and Romans from Greeks. As Afro-Eurasian trade routes and the Silk Roads flourished, aliens came into contact with aliens and became less alien to each other. They began to give each other names or, at least, call them by the names they wished to be called, usually the names of their empires. As empires gave way to provinces and provinces gave way to languages and languages gave way to dialects, boundaries began to be formed around how those of a particular language spoke, ate, dressed, appeared, believed, and mythologized themselves. We call that culture. As cultures diverged, empirical familiarities fractured and devolved back into the alienation of ethnicity, location, kingdom, locale, language. Colonialism tried to revive the old empires, but postcolonialism rebelled against those empires and gave rise to nationalism. Nationalities manufactured cultures and propagandized them, in order to make themselves spectacularly alien to the other nations of the world. And finally, today, as “democracy” spreads like a pool of shed blood over the earth, the alien is your next door neighbor, the bot liking your post, the person in line before and behind you at the Dollar General, the pest control technician who sprays your house with an unidentifiable poison, the doctor who pricks you with a needle full of chemicals neither you nor they can pronounce.

But I get it, those are not the “aliens” you mean. You mean, “extra-terrestrials.” You mean, those whose home is somewhere “out there” in outer space, whatever that means. Well, “terrestrial” means “of the earth.” So, “extraterrestrial” means “existing outside of or beyond the earth.”

So here you go:“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” (Genesis 1:1).

If it ain’t of the earth, then it must be of the heavens, and . . .

. . . if it ain’t of the flesh, then it must be of the spirit.

That’s what the world means when they say “alien,” a spirit being. Of which, mind you, there are only two factions: The Good and the Evil. John’s first epistle, chapter four, verses two and three gives me the question I ought to ask to ascertain which side he is on:

On sight, first thing out of my mouth will be, “Has Jesus Christ come in the flesh?”

Anything that can’t say, “Yes,” is the spirit of the antichrist.

Wrong side.