Never happen, no matter how obvious it is. If someone invented a magic mental ilness detector, and it showed that religion was a mental illness, religion would be given a pass and given it’s own special catagory (in this country especially ), or the device declared “discredited” for showing the obvious truth. Religion is mental illness, but it’s powerful, privileged mental illness, and will never be catagorized as such officially. Never.
Ready for that hug now?
You are free to express your personal belief that religion is an illness. You are not free to take your personal, unsupported belief and use it as an excuse to label another poster “sick.”
Note that I have made no criticism of your statements regarding religion. I am only pointing out that transferring that belief to a personal attack fails the propriety test in GD.
Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Hope you didn’t forget your Sonscreen…
Most of the rest of your post is only your opinion, so I can’t really attack it. I’d like some proof of the quoted claim, though.
lightwait If you would like to post a response I would like to go into your contention that if enough magnification is used you would see only light on both a physical and spiritual level:
On a physical level there are black holes, though this could cause gravitational lensing effect there are areas of darkness.
On a spiritual level there are forces of darkness (wickedness) in the heavenly realms:
C’mon Der Trihs, you’re way too up tight about this sorta thing. You gotta have fun every once in awhile.
OK, here’s my question: what the hell is the point? I mean, let’s assume Jesus is coming back really soon. What was the point of making souls, putting them in meat suits and then, depending on random genetic, environmental, and geographical happenstance, either rewarding them in heaven or having them burn forever in a lake of fire? I mean what the fuck? What was up with the flood and all those random Bible stories that make zero sense when critically examined?
OK, forget all that, so the timeline goes:
God makes man
We eat that apple and sin
God punishes man
Jesus comes and sacrifices himself, to himself (since Jesus and God are the same)
Insert last 2000 years here
Jesus comes again and kills everyone
People who believe in Jesus chill in heaven, people who don’t agree (like me) burn
…then what? An eternity of burning and flying around in the clouds? That was a random 6000 years for…what? It doesn’t even make sense. Is God gonna do this again? Are our souls in a perpetual rerun? Is he torturing aliens the same way he’s torturing us? If Satan is such a pissant, why doesn’t God poof him away? It’s because God is a sick puppy, right? We’re ants and he has the galactic magnifying lens.
I mean damn. If I was gonna be a theist I’d choose a cool god. Maybe one of those Greek ones – their stories are filled with drinking and incest and interesting stories that makes for good tales around the camp fire. Well, OK, so the Bible has some of that, but the mythical stories just don’t come close to the bar of entertainment. Look at Minerva, a beautiful goddess: she exploded out of Zeus’s head fully grown! And in the beginning Uranus and Gaia – literally the sky and the earth – had sex and had horrible, disfigured demon children who were hundreds of feet tall and then they had a war and killed each other. That’s way better than “let there be light.”
Screw Jesus – I wanna hear about Perseus using a cloak of invisibility, flying sandals, and a mirror shield to slay Medusa, take her head, and then use it to turn giant monsters into stone so he can rescue the girl and make lots of babies. Now that’s a story! And they just keep coming.
What was that one religion where the creator god got horny, jerked off, and the mess he left behind was the universe? It’s understandable why one would join that one – it’s creative and it’ll make the kids giggle.
Or maybe I’d choose a Lovecraft Great Old One – now that makes way more sense than the Bible, and would actually explain some things around this universe. It would certainly explain why there are so many crazy people.
One of my favorite proofs from this page:
Well, my holy book says that all holy books are full of lies.
Well, who knows who wrote your so-called “holy book” and how many times it’s been translated and re-interpreted? My holy book, on the other hand, is a true first-hand accounting that has never been changed by anonymous scholars. I know this is true, because I wrote it myself.
L. Ron…?
May I see your license so I can see that you have the proper credentials to diagnose a mental illness?
Will this warning make a difference? Will Der Trihs make another like statement again tomorrow? Books are open, place your bets!
I doubt if the OP is ever returning, but nothing I could find on google or wikipedia supports his claim. I’ve seen images taken from Hubble and other powerful telescopes, and even the most powerful show distant galaxies and black intergalactic space, not the wall of light the OP implies.
Hopefully a more qualified astronomer doper will comment, but I’m pretty sure the claim is BS.
Why do you guys even bother responding to obvious lunacy like this? Just let it go. He’s not going to respond rationally to any arguments, his OP isn’t rational to begin with. He’s just spraying religion around randomly hoping some of it will stick. If you guys just ignored this kind of stuff it might go away.
I mean, I don’t even read lekatt’s posts any more, much less respond to them. There’s no point, I’ve already read them, and responding to them doesn’t do anything.
Depends upon how you define light. What you see as blackness is merely the inability of your eyes to differentiate energy.
The problem here is that when a religious person says ‘light’ they mean energy in general. Any and all perception of action, and movement is ‘light’.
You are making the mistake of perceiving the limitations of your sensory and cognitive apparatus as being black voids in between bright spots. I cannot see sound waves, but that does not mean they do not exist.
As it is, galaxies put out light, and that light travels from galaxy to galaxy. As long as there is motion within those galaxies there is an output of energy, so there is a constant exchange of energy between clusters of bodies. Light however can only be seen directly. You don’t see light that moves at a different angle, only the light that is reflected directly to your rods and cones.
What you see out there is a contrast between the brightest wavelength you can perceive and the dimmest wavelength you can perceive. That does not mean that there is such a thing as a ‘void’ where light does not exist in the intervening space between galaxies, merely because YOU and I cannot see it.
If I see a person covered in oozing sores and coughing up blood, do I need a medical doctorate to say he’s sick ? Even if him and everyone around him are pretending he’s perfectly healthy because they are in the same condition ? Or are afraid of being shouted down or outright persecuted if they speak up ?
Except for the fellows over there with the constant sneezing and joint pain; they claim to be perfectly healthy, but the blisters and blood coughing people are obviously sick.
No, they mean “a made up definition that we will change at whim to avoid criticism.” Or they mean “spiritual” light, or in other words made up lunacy that we are supposed to pretend respect towards because it has the religion label slapped on it.
Balls. You are entitled to your own definition of “light”, of course, but to claim that all religious people claim it is equivalent to energy in general is BS. Both in the sense that it is wrong and in the sense that you couldn’t possibly know what all religious people say anyway.
As to the OP, Isaiah 60 also says (though I do not know which version he is quoting from);
And from Revelations 21, some context for his quote;
Seems pretty clear that there is a difference drawn between light as it is given off by stars and the concept of “light” as it refers to God. Suggesting that the light seen in the sky is itself the light of God would, I would think, be either a great understatement or even somewhat offensive. That you do not see any difference between the two, even when statements contradicting your argument are in the very passages you quote, makes it seem less like you’re walking in the light (or Light, as it may be) but that perhaps it’s a bit overcast?