Former President Barack Obama — a professing Christian — is predicting the discovery of life on other planets could spark “new religions.”
The 59-year-old Democrat shared his prognostication during a conversation with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein.
While the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would certainly be a paradigm shifting revelation, Obama said it wouldn’t change his politics.
“It’s interesting,” he told Klein. “It wouldn’t change my politics at all, because my entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating in the middle of space.”
“But, no doubt, there would be immediate arguments about, like, ‘Well, we need to spend a lot more money on weapons systems to defend ourselves,’” the former commander-in-chief continued. “New religions would pop up. And who knows what kind of arguments we get into.”
He went on to quip human beings are “good at manufacturing arguments for each other.”
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Although he once said the U.S. is “no longer a Christian nation,” Obama has professed Christianity for years. In 2008, as a candidate for president, he said he believed Jesus “died for my sins” and that he could “achieve everlasting life” through “His grace and His mercy and His power.”
Obama said he grew up in a non-religious home and didn’t come to believe in God until he moved ot Chicago.
In 1988, the late Rev. Billy Graham wrote he could find “nothing that would change our essential faith in the Gospel if we did discover life on other planets.”
“Our Bible is clearly designed for this particular plant with its particular problem of man’s sin,” the evangelist wrote. “When we observe this fact, we are on safe ground. It is not part of the Bible’s message to inform us of what God has don elsewhere. Its message is concerned with earth dwellers, their origin, the reason for their existence, the cause of their misery, and the plan of redemption for a fallen race.”
If there is life on other planets, Graham added, they are either “not involved in the sin problem” or, if they are, “God has made satisfactory provision for them” just as He has for human beings on earth.
As for Obama, his comments to Klein come ahead of the anticipated release of an unclassified Department of Defense report detailing previously unexplained activity centering on unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, and the U.S. military.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said recently the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is “actively working” to put together the report, adding that government and military officials take the idea of UFOs “very seriously.”
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