Friday, March 18, 2011

Charriots of the Gods

I am not a religious man. But I am not a god-less free thinker. I have a religious teaching to follow with and as a guidance of my life. The teaching from Confucius, Taoist and Buddhism are my guidance. These teachings, however, do not much cover the God chapter. Though I am a God believer that there is only one God regardless of which religion someone is following, be you are a Christian, Muslim, Hinddu or Chinese believers. As I believe God's teachings are to bring goodness to man-kind. And religion blossoms as different people has different cultures, hence such religion fit to such people.

During my teenage, I could keep myself in deep thinking of the existence of one-self, and the God. Once I am boldly enough to assume that there is only one God and He hand down His teaching through different languages, hence religion is created. And I was boldly assume that God is actually aliens from outer-space ! That was when I was 17.

Until recently when I watched the History Channel I know I am not alone to have this kind of "weird" thinking. There is a series of documentary in the History Channel titled as "Alien Astronauts" where the evidence of Earth being visited by alien in the pre-historic time is discussed. From there, I got to know Mr Eric Von Daniken and his book, "Chariots of the Gods".

Shame of me, this is my ever first English book (apart from text book of school and university). With "heavy heart", I started reading this book and got fascinated by the facts and hypothesis he made. He got my imagination runs wild !

First, Mr Von Daniken started his stories with a suppose that in our near future, man would have developed enough to travel to outer space out of our solar system into deep space. Then our astronauts found a Earth-like planet with alien creatures live on the surface. Due to the need of refueling the spaceship, our astronauts land on the planet, and started to build bases and harvesting minerals that required for the fly-home. The humanoid creature that live on the planet is so under develop that they resemble pre-historic human age. Few of the brave locals approach our astronauts who came from the sky with gigantic flying spaceship. Our astronauts were kind enough to interact with the locals, and hence the brave ones were elected as priests, or even kings. The local treat our astronauts as gods with advance technology. Our astronauts teach them simple knowledge of sciences, arts, numbers and mathematics. When the minerals required for a fly-home is enough, our astronauts left the planet. Since then, the locals treat our astronauts as Gods with powerful power!

Of course this kind of assumption so science fiction like, but it sounds logic to me. From the number itself, we, human or homo-sapien, can't be the only intelligent species in the vast universe! Someone, or something must have habitat one planet out there, unknown to us, that may one day we would contact them.

The book continues with stories and finding and paintings and writing from ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Sumerian, Greek and Hindu. Surprisingly, the stories of how God decent from sky is so similar in the holy text of these civilizations. That could be explain, in my opinion, that geographycally these civilizations are quite near to each other. People may travel from one place to another, carrying with them their legend, and been translated into language and culture that fit to them.

But what been written down and drawn by the ancient people of Latin America is really an un-explain. What Mr von Daniken says are quite logic as no way the ancient people would produce such a precise workmanship that require very precise accuracy! How would the ancient people move that gigantic rocks ? Why are the faces of that rock so alien-like ? Why pyramid?

One thing I don't understand is that Mr von Daniken never consider the myths told by Chinese as part of the "prove" that alien did visited Earth. For example: there is a myth about flooding in ancient China. There is a myth about how earth and heaven was form by a giant awaken from an "egg". There is a myth about how human been made from dirt. And the the myth of a princess flew to the moon. I myself had studied these Chinese mythology and felt convinced that our ancient Chinese did interact with the alien! Then why the story of God of the Chinese myth is so different from the near-by civilization ? Can this be explain as geographically China is separated from India and the Middle East by the Himalayas? Hence the story of God descending from heaven with gigantic spaceship is much different from the Chinese one.

The whole book writes about alien-traces in religion texts and ruin city walls of some major civilizations. It is a fun book to read. Many things seems to be un-explained can be explain by von Daniken. His points are some how valid and logic to me.


It's a nice book to read. I don't consider this book as an anti-religious book as it never challenge the existence of God. You can treat it as a science fiction story books, but what is written inside is too real to be fake. It's a fun book to be read.