I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?
Interpretation
The quote questions the role of religion in human development and its potential absence in non-mammalian intelligences.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote reflects on the nature of religion as a possibly unnecessary construct that arises during the early developmental stages of humanity. He proposes that as humanity evolved, religion emerged as a random by-product of reproduction, and this leads to intriguing questions about the existence of religion in other intelligent life forms that may not share our biological lineage, particularly those that are non-mammalian.
In practice
In a discussion on the evolution of societies, this quote can highlight the potential role of religion.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
If you don't know where you are currently standing, you're dead.
The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
I have become convinced that the more wealth a country accumulates, the more isolated and lonely its people become. The loneliest are usually the children and the elderly. Children learn what they live, and isolation in the ‘village’ is one of the most destructive messages we daily write on the tablets of their hearts.
Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal.
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