Talk:Chidhood's End

I'm sorry, I'm going to move the commentary from the parent page, for a couple of reasons:

1. This looks like it's been copied from somewhere else, and I'm not convinced that the copyright owner has given their permission to use it in this way. Could the person who added this material please clarify this. This is the major reason I moved the content here.
2. We avoid adding authorship of material in Wikipedia articles, so we'll have to remove the "By Daniel".
3. It's written as one person's take on the novel, and thus needs to read more neutrally and we should also leave out the somewhat idiosyncratic view on our supposedly post-Christian society.

--Robert Merkel

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Removed content below:

Cmmentary on Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End"

                                           by Daniel

             Imagine one day waking up to the news that huge flying saucers have positioned
          themselves above every major city in the world. Later that day, you and your astonished
         friends and family shudder to discover that every radio and television station in the world
        has been co-opted by the aliens in the spacecrafts and the following message is repeated
        over and over in all the worlds languages. "We are not here to harm you, we are friendly, we
          want to help you, protect you and guide you. We will not allow you to destroy yourselves.
         Warfare will no longer be allowed." The message goes on, but that's the gist of how Arthur
         C. Clarke in his book "Childhood's End" envisioned how contact would begin between the
                                        aliens and earth. 

             Clarke goes on to tell how the aliens use their powers to stop warfare; how they
           communicated to the earth through one man, the head of the United Nations; how the
            friendly space men took upon themselves the re-education of the planet through the
          co-opted radio and television frequencies. The aliens revealed. how they had helped to
        engineer the evolutionary development of the race, and how throughout our history they had
            worked through chosen vessels like Moses, Gautama, Confucius, Baha lai, Jesus,
            Mohamed and many others to try and steer the human race down paths of survival.
            Unfortunately, according to the aliens, all these enlightened teachers soon had their
        teachings corrupted and turned into religion. That's why they, our space brothers, were here;
             to correct our misunderstanding and to help us in our evolutionary development.

        Clark's writes that the aliens had revealed themselves in order to help the human race take
           the next big step in it's evolutionary progress. This next stage, as Clarke imagined it,
          involved the youth of the world metamorphosing into a universal mind and floating off the
        planet like a butterfly into another dimension. This coincided with the end of the ability of the
        race to procreate itself --the adults were left behind to grow old and just die off, thus the title
         of the book: "Childhood's End" Clarke, like many today, really believe that the human race
        is headed for a great evolutionary leap and that it could actually occur along the lines that he
        fictionalized in his book. Clarke wrote, that after the initial coming in their flying saucers, that
        it took decades before the aliens could actually reveal themselves personally to the people
        of earth. They first had to re-educate the planet and especially de-mystify the devil--because
        the funny thing was, that when the friendly space brothers finally did reveal themselves to the
        earth they looked like the spittin' image of the devil himself, or at least, how the old Christian
                    artists had painted the devil--with horns, cloven feet, and a tail! 

         Now Clarke envisioned it taking decades of re-education by the aliens in order to get the
        people to the point where the aliens could reveal themselves without freaking everybody out
           of their minds. However, Clarke wrote this back in the 1950s, and didn't anticipate the
           stupendous progress made in public education and the media towards demystifying
        religion and softening the minds of the masses to accept a demonic intrusion of Earth as a
         "Close Encounter Of The Third Kind".Today the entire western world is in a post-Christian
          era . It does have a Christian veneer, but underlying that is the new western paradigm of
          evolution with it's befuddled logic and a mind-set that is wide open to receive the great
          evolutionary deception of our friendly space brothers. They are ready to receive the the   Devil himself!