Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: credmond@watmath.waterloo.edu (Chris Redmond) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Extra-terrestrial worlds Message-ID: Date: 7 Oct 90 01:38:57 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Waterloo Lines: 29 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article mgobbi@cs.ubc.ca (Mike Gobbi) writes: >With regards to alien religions, I feel that the historical precedence will >hold. Looking again to the Indians for an example, we see that they had a >theology of their own before encountering the Christian faith. They were >just as saved by Christ's actions as the Jews, unawareness of the incident >notwithstanding. Similarly, any extraterrestrial beings would have been >saved by Jesus' sacrifice despite the fact that they have never heard of him >(or even of humanity...) If this is what Mike meant to say, I think he is mistaken. Extraterrestrial beings would need to be "saved", by Jesus's sacrifice or otherwise, *only* if they were fallen (sinful). There is no reason I can think of to assume that some other species or race would be fallen -- original sin is, according to Christian teaching, a historical property of human beings. Some of the science fiction works to which our Moderator referred later in the posting, including the well-known novels of C. S. Lewis, explore the interesting idea of fallen humans encountering unfallen 'klingons', so perhaps this point is obvious to most readers, but I thought it needed to be repeated. "Have you been saved?" is not the first thing to say to a Martian. :-) CAR credmond@watmath