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'.
You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.
It's pointless to have a nice clean desk, because it means you're not doing anything.
Wherever the fear of God rules in the heart, it will appear both in works of charity and piety, and neither will excuse us from the other.
A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.
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