Russian Orthodox Church equates aliens with demons
MOSCOW. April 20 (Interfax) - The Russian Orthodox Church has refused to recognize the existence of other civilizations outside Earth.
"If civilizations really existed on other planets, our Holy Scripture, the Bible, would definitely say something about that. If it doesn't say anything about it, we assume that they don't exist," head of the external church relations department of the Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan Hilarion said on the Rossiya-24 television channel.
To support his contention, he mentioned a book by Hieromonk Seraphim Rose, a prominent theologian of the Russian Church Abroad, called Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. The book contains testimonies by people who have seen aliens and UFOs, and the author compares these stories to manifestations of demons, stories that "exist in abundance in hagiographic literature."
"He proves in his book that people who have allegedly seen aliens really saw demons, whose existence many people now refuse to believe in," Metropolitan Hilarion said.
The church believes in the existence of angels and demons "not because this is stated somewhere, but because it is confirmed by the centuries-old experience of church people," he said.