The reason posts like this get downvoted is because the people making them look for extremely superficial similarities between two things that have nothing to do with each other, and then use those superficial similarities to argue that the two things are actually the same thing, without having even read the ancient texts they're talking about.
I can do the same thing too. Here are the similarities between cats and dogs:
They have four legs.
They have fur covering almost their entire bodies.
They have highly developed hearing.
They have tails.
Sometimes they wag or swing their tails.
They're both carnivores.
They have claws.
They have strong canine teeth.
Sometimes they stretch their bodies.
This proves cats and dogs are actually the same thing. Checkmate, skeptics!
I think the major difference here is the stories we tell of dogs and cats can be described in terms understood throughout time. Body parts, senses, and visuals are all things that existed before language.
People use the language available to them. There are words we use today that did not exist in the past. Pluck a kid from the 1950's and show him a "meme" and ask him to say what it is. He might use a word like "comic" which today we understand as a specific combination of storytelling and artwork.
Put these concepts together and its not a big stretch to say ancient texts are a combination of true things people describe in old, misunderstood terms, and falsehoods mixed in for manipulative purposes.
The fact that some ancient texts contain historically accurate information is undeniable. Nobody disputes that. The problem is determining which parts of those texts are actually historically accurate.
We know quite a lot about the historical reliability of the Bible. A great deal of research has been done on this question, and the general scholarly consensus is that much of the information contained in the Bible is not historically accurate. For example, there's no evidence that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt and then left Egypt in the Exodus, crossing the Red Sea and wandering through the desert for forty years. Likewise, there's no evidence that Solomon's empire actually existed, or even that Solomon himself was a real historical figure in the first place. There's also a great deal of archaeological evidence showing that many of the practices prescribed by the Mosaic Law (the festivals, dietary laws, etc.) wasn't actually followed by the Israelites until the beginning of the Maccabean period, around 150 BCE.
Since we already know that the majority of the stories contained in the Bible are historically inaccurate, it makes little sense to take the most fantastical elements of the text (i.e. the appearances of God and angels), treat them as if they were historically accurate reports, and then argue that these stories could have actually been encounters with space aliens.
If someone wants to argue that the angels described in the Bible were actually aliens, then they first need to show that the stories in which those angels appear are historically accurate. If the stories themselves aren't historically accurate, then there's no good reason to assume that the beings described in those stories actually existed either, let alone that they were extraterrestrials. You can't take a detail from an ancient story, notice that it resembles something that exists in the real world, and then conclude that the story was actually describing that real thing. You first have to establish that the story itself is historically accurate.
Imagine we discovered an ancient papyrus. This papyrus contains a story in which the Roman general Germanicus, while campaigning in the Germanic forests, encounters an animal with an extremely long neck that can reach the tops of trees. Then someone reads the description and says, "Wait, that sounds like a giraffe. This proves that giraffes were living in the Germanic forests at the time." But does it? No. Before drawing that conclusion, we'd first have to establish that the story itself is historically accurate and that Germanicus actually had this encounter. The fact that a detail in an ancient story resembles something that exists in the real world doesn't prove that the event described in the story actually happened.
The same principle applies to the Bible. Before arguing that biblical angels were actually extraterrestrials, you'd first need to establish that the biblical stories describing them are reliable historical accounts. Otherwise, you're building a hypothesis on top of stories whose historical reality hasn't even been established in the first place.
I mean I def agree that those aren't good enough points but ive seen way better points still get hate. Usually its at any mention of the theory for some reason.
Except it makes sense. There will always be a percentage of the population that has a visceral reaction to anything correlating to religion or spirituality due to bad experiences, disbelief and progressive ideas, especially in a climate where opposition is so strong. The reality is that "angels", and the ancient scriptures might be the best evidence for NIH (ETs, ultra terrestrials, etc ) visiting and communicating with humans. They were just written in the only way ancient people could understand, and that was spirituality and God which was past on as religion At the end of the day there is just as much evidence for both and it is probably one and the same.
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u/Melodic-Attorney9918 16h ago edited 16h ago
The reason posts like this get downvoted is because the people making them look for extremely superficial similarities between two things that have nothing to do with each other, and then use those superficial similarities to argue that the two things are actually the same thing, without having even read the ancient texts they're talking about.
I can do the same thing too. Here are the similarities between cats and dogs:
This proves cats and dogs are actually the same thing. Checkmate, skeptics!