Unimaginably huge

.... and so beautiful.

Catherine Hill Bay, NSW. Photo: Karl Lindsay

I did a piece a few years ago railing against the smallness of the imagination of most rabid right Christianists.  They focus on petty "rules" and "laws", when the universe is unimaginably vaster and more strange than anything they can imagine.

The recent discovery of nearly a thousand galaxies which were hidden from view by the stardust in our own galactic disk just emphasises this.  Our own galaxy has 200 to 400 BILLION stars.  And we are part of a pretty normal galaxy.  And now another thousand galaxies have been discovered.

You would think it was pretty hard to hide a galaxy containing tens of billions of stars – but nearly a thousand of them?

Hundreds of new galaxies have been identified within 250 million light years of Earth, hidden behind the glow of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The discovery is helping us understand the structure of our nearby universe and could challenge some of the assumptions of modern cosmology.

"The region we looked at is a very hard region to study; it's know as the 'Zone of Avoidance', another name for the plane of our own galaxy," Professor Lister Staveley-Smith at the University of Western Australia, told Fairfax Media

The centre of our galaxy is teeming with dust clouds and billions of stars. Very little optical light is able to penetrate the dense dust and gas. Even when it does, the foreground stars are so densely packed together that they blind our telescopes to the faint glow from more distant objects. Space behind the Milky Way is invisible to us on Earth.

Using novel techniques in radio astronomy, Australian scientist Professor Staveley-Smith and his team were able to detect 883 new galaxies, a third of which have never been seen before and the rest of which were barely smudges.

Read more here.

Oppressed ...

... today by the suffering of life, by loneliness of so many people in the world, by grief and loss, by betrayal and illness and death.  I miss Nimbo and Sharpie and ... and people too.

I should be more philosophical I suppose and be glad of the good things too.   Usually I am, but tonight ... it's too hard.  Well.

Onwards and upwards.

Source. Click to see magnificent full size

Kilts are Sinful

So saith this bloke.

Wreath-laying on a windy Anzac Day

This drongo has obviously never worn a kilt.  Or met Scotsmen.  Soft?  Pull the other one, it's got bells on.  Kilts are very hairy, made of a thick and oily wool so that men can stride through wet heather without getting the bottom half of their clothes wet.  (Socks can be dried in front of the fire).  Traditionally worn without underpants, they also rub in uncomfortable places.  Believe me, they are not 'soft'. 

Let's set that aside for a moment.  What if men had worn 'kilts' and women trousers in Biblical times?  Would the great and good of the Bible have instructed us that this was the natural order:  obviously men wore kilts and obviously women wore trousers?  It has always been so , and so obviously the Lord wanted it that way, and if you deviate from His word, Holy Macaroons, you are so going to hell.  Hell, if I go to Hell, you may depend on it: it will not be because of my attire.

Doubly Sinful

And why is a robe not a skirt?  What am I missing?  And is it OK for women to wear underpants, since they are pants not a skirt?  The Abbé de Somewhere-or-Other thought not, when  women's bloomers were first introduced.  He thought them immoral and a vile perversion.  So it always is:  the way we do things now (or in some mythical past) is the best way.

Roman and Greek men wore "skirts".  But then we all know that they were effete and immoral, unlike those manly Teutons and Celts, whose men wore trousers but also (like the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Indians, and everybody except the Jews -- oh, but wait, there was Jonathan and King David) slept with men.  An Irish wife could divorce her husband if he spent too much time with his (male) lover. The Teutonic tribal chiefs drove their chariots into battle with their young man beside them.

It's ningies like this who make religion look ludicrous.  Does anybody intelligent for one minute think that the Being who made the Universe cares about whether your nether garment has a dividing piece of cloth in it or not?  Somewhere between 100 and 200 billion stars in our own galaxy.  Billion.  Repeat after me:  our star is one of around 150 BILLION stars in this galaxy alone*. And as far as the Hubble telescope can see, for billions of light years in all directions, there are countless, literally countless, galaxies.  Each with billions of stars.  In the Amazon basin, there are, we are told, ten thousand species of beetle.  Why do these literal Christianists think God is so small?  He is Grand, Awesome, All-Powerful, Terrible, if He is anything at all.  He is Everywhere and in Everything, out in every direction, across limitless space.  He doesn't give a flying rat's clacker about kilts.  He's too busy contemplating the ineffable beauty of His creation.

Real men wear kilts.  With nothing on underneath.


[*Correction and update:  My tally of stars in our galaxy was from memory.  In fact there are at least 200 billion stars, and there may be as many as 400 billion.  Our close galactic neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, has one trillion stars.  And you can be sure, on every star system in both galaxies, God is having conniptions about men who wear skirts]