Indeed

It's the logos that everyone has, even when they're atheist.

We are immediately presented with the impossibility that all this order came from no designer.

The guilty conscience jumps in, "shh! If you say that then you'll be subject to that designer!"

"Oh right...well...then let's look for a designer or designers that could explain all this order but without making us morally subject to them."

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In the words of Johnny Cash, "they say they want the Kingdom, but they don't want God in it."

When your mind is not occupied with cult rituals, you're free to use your mind as you see fit. Some people choose to spend their time on aliens... thats not how I would spend my time, but freedom means being free to waste your time.

At least it's a more benign thing to fill the spiritual void in them than statism

It is my belief that the aliens are religious.

What most people call their "religion" is empty window-dressing, and what most people tout as their moral virtue is irrelevant, as long as they believe in the myth of "authority." Christians, for example, are taught things such as "If someone strikes you, turn the other cheek," "Love your neighbor" (and even "Love your enemy") and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Yet every so-called Christian who believes in "government" constantly forsakes these principles, advocating constant aggression against everyone—friend and enemy, neighbor and stranger—via the cult of "government." To put on a show of being pious, religious, compassionate, loving and virtuous, while "voting" for a gang that promises to use violence to control the actions of everyone you know, is the height of hypocrisy. To refrain from personally robbing one's neighbor, while pushing for someone else to do it, is both cowardly and hypocritical. Yet almost every Christian (and every member of every other religion) does such things on a regular basis, by way of "political" advocacy. As mentioned before, faith in "government" is a purely religious belief. As such, the vast majority of those who wear the label "atheist" are not actually atheists, because they believe in the god called "government." They do not recognize it as a religious belief, of course, but their belief in that ethereal, superhuman savior of mankind ("authority") is as deep and faith based as any other religious belief.

Most Dangerous Superstition, Larken Rose

Most people treat The Science™️ as a religion

Just more willing to entertain the idea of aliens?

Point being — If you realize that all is interconnected, that we are all God’s children, all part of Indra’s Net, all offspring of Iluvatar’s thought, or however your cultural flavor of religion prefers to call it, Aliens aren’t that worrisome.

On the other hand, if you view aliens as truly *other* than us, and believe you are “a stranger and afraid in a world I never made” already, that is quite worrisome and thrilling indeed.

You might enjoy this episode of Haunted Cosmos:

https://fountain.fm/episode/ThES2qADvqzvgWqjGQib

Really worth a listen.

Re: filling the void — I agree and think this is a large part of it. The atheist needs a universe in which he is not utterly alone. But i think there is more to it than cope. Atheism is defined as an absence of theistic belief, but everyone deifies (and therefore worships) something. It is not whether but which. The atheist is just as religious as the theist. It is inescapable.

The *belief* in intelligent alien life makes sense in an evolutionary and materialistic cosmology. It is often the case that aliens represent, in some sense, a futuristic projection of our own transcendant potential in the minds of those fixated on them. Yet, it is a false, even flat, cosmology that cannot abide anything overtly *spiritual*, and instead redirects spiritual belief into things like extraterrestrials, supposed material beings of awe-inspiring technological and evolutionary advancement.

Ultimately it is occult, demonic deception.