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If Jesus, Then Aliens: Difference between revisions
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Trope Part the Second: Anyone on television who is a skeptic, rationalist, atheist, "scientist" or other critical-thinking type believes in nothing. Thus the contrapositive, ''If Not Aliens, Then Not Jesus''. Alien abductions are bunk, and so are psychics, and therefore God does not exist. A declaration by a scientist that they do not believe in one thing, such as ghosts, automatically means they think that anything supernatural, including the spiritual and the religious, is total nonsense and anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot.
The rhetorical term for [[You Fail Logic Forever|this kind of thinking]] is a "[[False Dichotomy]]": A person must be either a [[Agent Mulder|Believer]] or a [[Agent Scully|Rationalist]], but may not ever be both, nor fall somewhere between the extremes. Any belief on one side or the other will result in all beliefs on that side so this trope can exist with the title implication often running in reverse;
The existence of characters of this type is sometimes caused by a [[Writer on Board]], but more often is the simple result of taking complex, complicated real people with diverse belief sets and trimming them down into stereotypes so they can be pitted against each other in a "[[wikipedia:Conflict thesis|Faith versus Science Showdown]]" which might be resolved by a [[Golden Mean Fallacy|Golden Mean Aesop]]. This usually just comes off as an insult to everyone involved. It's false equivalence, and further ignores the fact that from a skeptical point of view, the existence of one supernatural thing provides no reason to believe in another unrelated supernatural thing, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that many religions frown heavily on belief in non-natural events that do not come from God. It's also ironically wrong for a different reason; people without religious beliefs are ''more likely'', statistically, to believe in aliens. So a closer-to-truthful trope name would be ''If Aliens, No Jesus'' or, perhaps more fittingly, ''If Jesus, No Aliens''.
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