We Shall All of Us Be Equal in Our Discombobulation

Many have remarked that The Big Disclosure, when it comes, will be very upsetting for those of us who believe in God, more or less conventionally.  Surely an alien form of Jesus was not sent down to Zeta Reticuli to absolve the greys of their sins.  Something will not compute here on a fundamental basis for the devout Catholic or Evangelical.

But I believe that the discombobulation will be general.  Let's take a committed, lifelong atheist like the late Christopher Hitchens, a man I admire deeply for his intellect and his courage.  It may be too much to say that materialism/scientism was a religion for him, but he was secure in its pieties, even as he faced an early death from cancer.  There was a narrative that explained his life, his place in the universe, even though it offered him no hope of life after life.  There was a place for humanism and for ethics in that narrative as well, and a place for caring about the fate of his friends and loved ones whom he left behind.

Hitchens and his fellow travelers have been secure in their conviction that "God does not exist."  Insofar as the God who does not exist is pictured as the God of the great monotheistic faiths -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam-- the Big Disclosure will not undermine this specific conviction.  The Disclosure nonetheless is likely to completely upend the materialist narrative.  God will not exist, but "the gods" will exist, almost as they did for the Greeks and the Romans, with all of their whimsicality and potential for mayhem.  The materialists/scientists will say "this cannot be!"   But no one will be able to will it away.

Lue Elizondo, the former head of the government's AATIP program, which was charged with figuring out the Phenomenon, podcasted for nearly three hours this week with Curt Jaimungal, the young host of "The Theory of Everything."   He intends to write a book that will have shocking and compelling "small d" disclosures in it, a book that will be vetted by the US government which, one hopes, will choose not to suppress it.

Lue said in the interview that his own psychological posture these days is "sober" and "somber."   "Why?," he was asked.  He replied that we have, all of us, come to think of ourselves as the zookeepers of the universe, and that it will not be pretty when we are hit with revelations to the effect that we are just animals in the zoo.  The zookeepers are among us, and they have not, unlike God the Father, Jesus His Only-Begotten Son, or Allah, set out for us rules to which we need only adhere if we want to stay on the right side of the law.  If the gods choose to make us their playthings, there won't be a damned thing we can do about it.  And for the materialist/scientist, the fact that these beings and their handiwork will be absorbable into an expanded and revised "Book of Nature" will offer no solace.