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'.
So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.
Every person you look at, you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking
Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world (from where?), space is by far the less mysterious. It, too, undergoes transformations. Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would even say against human nature.
One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.
The moment when someone attaches you to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you. And when you want to have a conversation, they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association. And that's not the way to have a conversation.
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