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'.
Ever man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease - that of thinking.
Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.
All growth, progress, well - being, or degradation is but relative.
Men have no special right because they belong to one race or another: the word man defines all rights.
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell.
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