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people wondering whether an authentic spiritual phenomenon could ever legitimately manifest in such accord with one particular religious belief—pattern..." "Well, that's just the point...it seems that, despite a lot of official resistance to the whole idea of latter-day miracles and special manifestations of spiritual apparitions not strictly controllable—in their spontaneous appearances—by church authority, nonetheless there's a lot more recent willingness to accept or implicitly condone this activity on the part of the papal hierarchy just because it tends to ship so much dogmatic content along with glowing forms and colored lights; in a sense it seems to present just the unexpected boost in the arm to religious traditionalism that was needed in an increasingly skeptical and secularized world but which couldn't be generated from within the restricted sanctions of cathedral walls and so forth." "Then it seems a case could be made for the idea that a lot of the apparitions are engineered by the superior technologies of the saucer—beings, since they follow the official programs and parochial customs so religiously'." "Seems so. Common sense would tend to tell you it would be hard for a legitimate spiritual phenomenon to get the sectarian details down so exact unless (no. 1) there was a 'one true religion' of the most specialized denominational type, or (no. 2) there was a manipulative intelligence behind the scenes presenting such digestible formats for its own purposes. An important point not to forget in all this"—Jack stirs the embering campfire, sparks leap from the twirling tip of the twig—"is that the spacebeings could be telling different groups different things for different purposes." "Like for instance, we only know about that display they apparently put on in private for the top brass, because of an information leak. Maybe that 'disclosure' wasn't meant for the majority of people, just for the 'generals' and the corporate popes that run the show—maybe that hologram/national—geographic special on Golgotha the beings put on was only meant for certain eyes so that they could be weaned away from any residual attachment to the religious formulas that keep the majority entranced; maybe they needed to take away the last, conditioned affiliation to the docile-sheep mentality so that they could be more easily led into unrestrained lust of total power. These 'big boys' would be the souls the spacebeings intended to capture, to enlist as buck privates at the bottom of the pecking order of their own psychic hierarchies; and the majority of mankind that wasn't already predisposed or basically committed to self-serving power—aggrandizement would comprise the souls the spacebeings intended to ens/ave, through the unleashed manipulations and diabolicizcd machinations of the former!" "Far out..." "Wow," Hoppcr breathes, looking starward in a kind of awe at the conceptual magnitudes so suddenly sprawled out before him, "then ultimately, like, it all boils down to a spiritual war after all; it all comes down to a battle for the psyche of mankind, for the allegiance of mankind's heart and soul! And a major part of it has to do with the question whether conventional religion is the refuge against the onslaught of the negative darkness, such as belief in Jesus and all that, or whether in fact it's all a cleverly prepared trap meant to keep people locked into negative anxiety patterns so that they perpetually postpone their own spiritual development, put off seeing through their own personally awakened eyes in favor of anticipating their ultimate salvation through an arbitrary belief!" "Yes, the frail arbitrariness of which is cleverly compensated by making it a matter of dogma, giving it the status of a culturallysanctioned absolute the very questioning of which is a heresy meant to throw up inbuilt 77 T-Bird_Vs_The_Flying_saucers.htm "T'll bet it doesn't bother the Catholics..." "Like what, for instance?"