Okay, I’ve seen many pictures of Jesus, Buddha, Hindu Gods, Sikh Gods, etc.
Now in many of these pics, the figure in question (Buddha/Jesus/Mary …) is shown to have an aura, that is like a light on/behing there head.
Someone explained to me that people in earlier times used to be able to “see” people’s aura, and this is something we have lost over time. I find that hard to believe. I know that the brain produces EM radiation, but don’t think it produces any visible rad. or that people can see EM radiation from the brains. So my questions are :
a> Is there any scientific evidence to show that the brain can generate enough EM radiation for other people to see ?
b> Is there any scientific evidence that shows that the spectral range of detection (near IR to near UV spread) for humans have decreased or changed over centuries ?
c> Assuming that the Aura theory is false, What is the explanation that people living continents apart chose to depict Aura in their God(s) ?
Please - this is a GQ and request to keep religious beliefs out of this and limit to scientific evidence.
Er, first you’d have to prove that people living “continents apart” portrayed their gods with auras or halos. All the religions that you mentioned–Christianity (as considered as a sect of Judaism), Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism–are in fact from the same continent, being Asia, or as close as no-nevermind.
I saw on TV that the Aura = holy thing comes from a trick of the light under certain circumstances. You look at your shadow on the ground and you can see an aura around your head. If you look at anyone else’s shadow under the same circumstances, you will not see the aura.
The aura in pictures was most likely borrowed from other religion’s art, similar to the way that the look of devils and and angels were borrowed.
Thank you for those answers. That explains it quite well. Now to the other part - Is there any evidence that human’s spectral cognisance has decreased over the ages ?
Not so much a trick of light as a trick of your eyes –
Any time you focus on a dark object with a bright background, the parts of your retina receiving bright light become desensitized. If you remain fixated on the object, as your eye or the object moves slightly, parts of the bright background will become visible around the edges of the object, where the retina has been not been desensitized. This makes it appear as the object is giving off light of its own.
This effect is very likely to come into play when someone is listening to a particularly engaging speaker, and their attention is undivided.
My question was not on the intensity of the light but rather the frequency/wavelenght of it. Like is the range of spectra we can detect decreased or increased over time ?
The halo image originated in Greco-Roman iconography from Sun God symbology. The halo imitated the corona of the sun. Later it made its way into Christian and Far Eastern imagery.
The only EM radiation a person’s head would radiate that’s anywhere near the visible band would be IR, and that would be dependant on the temperature of the person. Maybe Jesus was a hothead.
Seriously, though, I’ve never seen any evidence that our eyesight has moved away from the infrared. The ability to see IR would have huge evolutionary benefits, and it couldn’t just disappear in the last thousand years.
In the BOOKThe Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis (not to be confused with the movie of the same name), he mentioned that navigators in the 16th Century (I’m going from memory here, so I could be a bit off) used Venus to guide them during the daytime. He says that Venus should still be visible to us during the daylight hours, but it’s not. He doesn’t think that our ability to see Venus has changed (though with air pollution, it might be a factor) merely that we’ve stopped training our eyes to see it. I don’t think that anyone’s ever seen an aura around a person, but if you’ve ever been around someone who’s very charismatic, you notice that they seem to have a presence larger than themselves. The aura image (though it may have been inspired by sun-god imagery), is more likely an attempt to capture the physicality of a charismatic person than a representation of something someone actually saw.
Whoa! Considering that at one time Satan was linked to the morning star, that’s kind of odd.
Actually, I only mentioned the whole thing about sun gods in my post to avoid someone saying, “Ya idjit! We’ve already decided that it was inspired from sun god imagery!” I do have, however, a book which makes the claim (and rather well documented, too, I might add) that much of what we know of Jesus was borrowed from various sun gods.
Ah, yes, Mithra, Sol Invictus, the winter solstice. I’m very familiar with all of it. We actually had a thread about it in GD a little while ago. It caused some pretty heated debate. Fundies don’t like those comparisons much. Personally, I think there are way too many similarities between Christian mythology and pre-Christian Greco-Roman mystery cults for it to be a coincidence, but there are definitely people on this board (Libertarian, for one) who take umbrage with that implication.
Actually, the “Satan=‘Morning Star’” (or “Lucifer”) verse, Isaiah 14:12, was more likely originally a reference to the human king of Babylon than to a fallen archangel and supernatural personification of evil. (See the entire chapter for context: “On the day the LORD gives you relief from suffering and turmoil and cruel bondage, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon…How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!”)
However, the “star falling from heaven = fallen archangel being cast down” interpretation seems to have become popular early enough to have influenced several New Testament references (including Luke 10:18).