Globular Cluster NGC 6397

[Submariner]

Just too cool a picture for words. My biggest regret in life is I will not be around when we can travel easily between the stars.



http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/entire_collection/pr2006037b/large_web

[opihimoimoi]

1. Just awesome....beautiful....if we just see some planets up close...Damn

[annabanana]

2. wow! . .. . .n/t

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. Maybe next time around... nt

[sakabatou]

4. Pretty

[bdf]

5. Gawd put those there

Just to amuse us. It says so in the Babble. And the Babble is the literal, inerrant word of Gawd Awmighty, so you know it's true.

That's only the beginning of Gawd's miracles. Many stars are so far away that it takes light millions of years to travel from them to us. Which puzzles some folks because if Gawd created the universe 6012 years ago, as Babblical scholars have calculated, then the light from those stars should not yet have reached us. Gawd, in his wisdom, not only created those stars but also created the light that would have reached us had the universe actually existed for the 4,500,000,000 years those crazy scientists believe.

What a joker Gawd is! He creates a universe with lots of fake evidence contradicting the Babble. And if we're foolish enough to believe the evidence instead of the Babble, he consigns us to burn in Hell for all eternity. And he does this because he loves us.

BTW, that's a stunningly beautiful picture, whatever anyone believes about the origins of the universe. But it's kind of hard to believe that we are the centre of everything, that we have Gawd's special attention, when we realize that each of those bright points in the picture is a Sun just like ours. Why would Gawd create them and just ignore them? As amusements for us? Whole fucking suns? What a waste.

[pokerfan]

6. The speed of light was a lot faster before The Fall of Man™

The universe was created by an all-powerful all-knowing being who came down to us in the form of a cosmic jewish zombie (who was his own father) who can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Q.E.D.

[bdf]

7. It's NOT symbolic

The eucharist is not symbolic, ritual cannibalism, it is actual ritual cannibalism. Well, it is if you believe in it, because of the miracle of transubstantiation. Catholics believe that the wafer and wine actually turn into flesh and blood upon swallowing. That makes them cannibals.

However, I can perform a greater miracle than transubstantiation. Greater because I do not need to take holy orders, wear special clothes or use special words to invoke it. Greater still because God never declines to aid my miracle even although it is certain that He does not wish to do so. I call my miracle "reverse transubstantiation" and it works like this...

Find a catholic who has just received the eucharist. Kick him in the guts so hard that he vomits. I guarantee you that on the pavement will be bread and wine, not flesh and blood. What requires a priest, blessed bread, blessed wine and holy mumbo-jumbo to acheive can be reversed with a simple kick.

How can I guarantee that it always works? Because if it didn't, the Catholics would already have used the trick to clone Jebus.

[pokerfan]

8. it is for protestants (n/t)

[TechBear_Seattle]

10. You may wish to look up neo-Platonism

Tbe philosophy of neo-Platonism is at the root of quite a bit of Christian theology. It holds that there is a distinction between forma, the material, physical qualities, and substansia, the spiritual, non-physical qualities. The change in the Eucharist is one of substance, not form, which is why they call it transubstantiation rather than transformation.

This same philosophy is also the root of the sacraments, which bring about a change in a person's substance rather than his or her form.

[bdf]

11. Hmmmm...

A quick look at Wikipedia's article on "substance theory" (which comes in various flavours, most of them discredited) gives the example of ice melting. It is still the same substance, but has a different form. One could equally take a pile of sand and build a sandcastle - a transformation not a transubstantiation.

Therefore, the eucharist does turn literally into the blood and flesh of a guy who has been dead 2,000 years. That's what Catholics believe. That's how Catholics describe it informally. And, as you appear to have unintentionally pointed out, the use of the word transubstantiation rather than transformation bears out my interpretation.

When I chew bread it is transformed into a paste-like consistency but its substance is still that of wheat that has been ground, leavened, and baked. When a Catholic does it, it is transubstantiated into something else completely. Or so Catholics believe.

[TechBear_Seattle]

12. I wasn't aware one could "discredit" a philosophical position

I never said that Catholics (why are you ignoring Orthodox, Anglicans and other traditions which hold to this doctrine?) did not believe that the Eucharist does not literally turn into the body and blood of Jesus. I said that any physical inspection of the bread and wine before and after this change would detect nothing, as the change occurs in the presumed immaterial nature of the elements and not in the material nature.

[bdf]

13. I still do not see your logic

OK, I mentioned Catholics because they're the best known. Anglicans are a small spin-off.

You're saying that it undergoes transubstantiation, that is the substance changes but it looks the same. I don't buy that. Somebody once supposedly changed water into wine. The form remains the same - liquid - so it's not a transformation. But the substance changed - transubstantiation. Presumably it looked like wine, smelled like wine, tasted like wine, and got you drunk like wine. A measurement of the density would show it to be less dense than water and of the same density as wine. Chemical tests would pick up alcohol.

So DNA tests on post-transubstantiation wafer would not pick up denatured wheat DNA but undenatured human DNA.

Here's an easier one for you. Who said "My me, my me, why have I forsaken myself"? Please note that if you quibble with that wording, you must think that Jebus was not really God and not part of the Trinity.

[NJCher]

15. right-O, pokerfan

But if a person believes that UFOs harbor visitors from other planets, that person is a NUT!

Cher

[rosesaylavee]

9. Have you checked out this NASA site? Astronomy Pic of the Day

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

I have it as my home page - today there is a square nebula. Very beautiful photos from that wonderful Hubble.

[pokerfan]

14. My second favorite globular is visible now

My favorite I've only seen a couple of times. Everyone always talks about seeing the Southerm Cross but for me, it's all about Omega Centauri:



Ever read Nightfall by Asimov? Life on a planet with six suns which never all set at the same time thus the inhabitants have never seen the night sky. Every 2,000 years all but one of the suns sets and then it is eclipsed by its dark companion revealing the stars the people have never seen. It turns out they live deep inside a globular cluster and the night sky is filled with millions of stars. They are unprepared for this, madness follows and their civilization collapses only to recover and repeat the process in another 2,000 years.