UFO Religions

ISBN-13: 9780415263238 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 400 str.

Christopher Partridge

Opis

In France, a UFO group known as the Raelian Movement works to create the first Embassy welcoming extra terrestrials from space, claiming that the world is the work of an alien people who built it from DNA. The Aetherius Society of Great Britain claims to receive cosmic transmissions from space intelligences, offering the chance to listen to online recordings of a spoken transmission from Jesus Christ. In San Diego, March 1997, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate group commited mass suicide at the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, believing that heavenly beings on a UFO wait there to gather them into the Kingdom of Heaven. There is no doubt that the spectre of the UFO, as popularised by shows such as The X-Files, has brought an astonishing and often apocalyptic slant to the motley face of modern religious practice.

Spis treści

Contributors Acknowledgements Foreword INTRODUCTION 1. Understanding UFO Religions and Abduction Spiritualities PART ONE OBERSERVING RELIGIONS 2. Scientific Creationism: A Study of the Raelian Church 3. When the Archangel Died: From Revelation to Routinization of Charisma in Unarius 4. Opening a channel to the stars: the Origins and Development of the Aethrius Society 5. Legitimating Suicide: Heaven's Gate and New Age Ideology 6. The URANTIA Book 7. Ansaru Allah Community 8. From Extraterrestrials to Ultraterrestrials: the Evolution of the concept of Ashtar 9. UFO Faith and Ufological Discourses in Germany 10. The Finnish UFO Tradition, 1947-1994 PART TWO UNDERSTANDING NARRATIVES 11. UFO Religions as Cargo Cults 12. Alien Doubts: Reading Abduction Narratives Post-apocalyptically 13. UFO Beliefs as Syncretistic Components 14. Apocalyptic and Millenarian Aspects of American UFOism 15. Attitudes Toward Religion and Science in the UFO Movement in the United States 16. Jung on UFOs 17. The Psychology of UFO Phenomena

O autorze

Christopher Partridge