xlint question, the answer is obvious ! I will ask my xian freinds.   Thanks ! 

You say all of our religious are foreign to them.  Can I also assume they don't have their own religion?

If so, I'll be pushing you all out of the way so I can get to the front of the 'abduction' line. 

UltraMonk, you are a blast, shiting my pants ....

I think it would be a safe assumption to say that the aliens would not have any religion.  I think that if they did have religion they would be too bogged down on their home planet trying to kill and convert each other to want to travel outside of their solar system.  Also, I would think that if they had gained such a vast knowledge of science and the cosmos to the point where they could travel through enormous amounts of space that they would have abandoned thoughts of religion and supersticion.  Again, totally hypothetical, but I really enjoy thinking about this and hearing what others think about it. 

on a serious note, an alien would probably turn the fuck around and go back.  sadly, this would probably happen before i was beamed aboard.

we are really screwed up and pretty much incapable of interacting with inhabitants of another planet.  i've reached this conclusion by looking at how we can't even get along among countries on this planet.

the only reason i can conclude that an alien would land would probably involve having the technology to stun or nuke us all combined with a huge desire for some sort of natural resource the could not get elsewhere.  since "we come in peace" would probably meet the end of a shotgun. i would actually be impressed if we managed to try to "save" them.

Back in my Fundie Christian School days, I was discussing UFOs with my friend, who seriously suggested that the devil created UFO rumors so that when the Rapture came Satan'd have something he could explain it away with.

Do we listen to herds of cattle about their religion as we take them to the slaughterhouse?  I suspect that the alien situation would be similar.  Anything that can travel that far is not going to be interested in us and our beliefs. 

After all, "It's a cookbook!"

Right, perhaps they would be as compassionate as the Dominicans in Iberia.  They'll convert us with the whip and sword.  It would be cool though.  A lot of Christians would see it as an opportunity for martyrdom. I hope I get picked as a pet so I can go to the forum.  lol

I think if we met any "aliens" then they would be nothing like us, in that their technology would be so far advanced beyond ours that they would basically be gods, in that they had already converted all of their biological and thought processes to computer components of some kind, and were now having billions of times the thoughts that your measely biological evolved brain can produce.  A brain designed by technology would squash the human one.  Ever read Ray Kurzwell?  Ya, I don't think we will be meeting any "aliens" that are anything but computers.

 In other words, they will be immortal, which means that they will have no reason for religion.  They might even know how to jump to other universes (if they can arrive in ours, they would have most likely have had to travel faster than light to ever reach us).  In that case, they can outsurvive the life of this universe, possibly being truely immortal.  

Ooo, I wana meet these aliens :P 

I think this view of aliens as automatically more culturally "advanced," peaceful and wise is overly naive.  If natural selection tells us anything, it says that peaceful, wise, artistic tendencies are not always selected for.

Among the many reprehensible things L. Ron Hubbard wrote is a decent SF novel, "Battlefield Earth."  (No one should ever see the film, by the way.)  In that novel, the conquering aliens are basically unintelligent brutish thugs who stole all their advanced technology from other races and used it to conquer the galaxy, even though they barely understand it.  This scenario doesn't seem any less likely than the wise, kind race. 

It's an absurd expression of romantic hope. With our field of exobiology wholly speculative, and Astrosociobiology essentially guesswork, we simply cannot infer anything about them. We seem to go through cultural phases pertaining to how we percieve what alien sentience might be like. From the LGM phase "little green men", to the "God aliens" phase, the belief that the aliens will have advanced beyond the petty struggles that characterize mankind to become superbeings. The Anthropomprhic problem comes from men characterizing possible sentient life as basically human. Man is man, and all he knows is man (this same problem could be applied to our conception of God). The Anthropic Principle and the Anthropomorphic problem inform us that these aliens are unlikely to be anything like us whatsoever. They might not even use the same sense equipment. They might not percieve the same wavelengths and frequencies even if they did have the same sense equipment. Their metabolic rate might be so different that what is an hour of consciousness to us might be several seconds to them. They might be blind and develop a "language" through a sense equipment we don't even have, like pressure or temperature (consider that our "language" is, in its essence,  a highly complex pattern generated by the vibration of molecules through the air being processed by a vibrating drum, and this no longer seems absurd). Indeed, it would be very unlikely that we would have any common ground at all.

On the other hand, the principles of Convergent evolution and Mediocrity inform us that because (a) the more complex species are, the more limits there are on basic underlying constraints and (b) there are built in limits to the complexity which evolution can generate (this is the Mutation Principle), and (c) It is more probabalistic that due to the extremely narrow requisites for life and especially sentient life, and (d) Evolution tends to force modularity even with divergence, they would be extremely similar to us. 

So, we cannot know without test subjects, I say. 

If my luck had any bearing on it the aliens would probably be some version of fundamentalist xtians in their own right with tons of torture implements to convert us to belief in their sky daddy.  Those arriving would be like the missionaries who killed those who refused to accept their bullshit.