Mags, I respect your way of looking at it. Honestly, I don't care if people believe in God or Jesus or Allah or whatever. Good on them. If it makes you happy, and you have a good life, awesome. What absolutely pisses me off is when people take their beliefs and then try to use those beliefs to persecute others or oppress others. That's when I feel they've overstepped their bounds. The Westboro Baptist Church is not helping Christianity right now. The best way I can equate it is to how much of the world views America. We have our beliefs, we have our own ideology, and we go around the world tampering and putting our political system in place. It's no miracle that people hate the US. I was watching Argo and at the beginning they were talking about how most of the reason for the Iran hostage crisis was because the US and England engineered a coup to overthrow the leader of Iran and put into power a more westernized government. When we tamper in other countries to benefit our own interests, people will hate us. Period. I think that's very similar to how some people feel about Christianity or Islam right now. When Christians scream about morals and hell, and try to keep gay people from getting married, it just makes people hate Christians. They don't care if it's all Christians, they just see the vocal part of the community and judge. Similarly, we see the Muslims that are trying to kill us and many people equate that to all Islam and all Muslims. Or many people around the world think that all Americans voted for Bush, or were in favor of the war in Iraq. I will say, that I think it's annoying how many atheists have a superior attitude towards Christians. They aggressively pester Christians, so I don't think they're any better than the people they're criticizing.
I agree with everything you say 100%. I think true Christians shouldn't be all hell fire and brimstone. I think Grace should be the #1 priority
As for the OP, I'm curious about how we are able to map the universe that way with such precision. I've seen pictures of the Milky Way galaxy (our galaxy), who or what took them? Didn't we just make it Mars? The universe is probably too much for us to grasp so I wouldn't trust a picture attempting scale to it. Sly's pictures would probably only be the tip of the iceberg too. I think we're best worry about our own planet which we barely understand anyway.
Nice video! I love looking at the universe. I used to have a telescope when I was a kid and I did a lot of star searching.
This guy explains it pretty good I think. http://io9.com/5956960/how-to-take-pictures-of-the-milky-way-without-leaving-the-galaxy
We don't know for sure what our galaxy looks like. We make a best guess based on the fact that we can see billions of others of various shapes. From what we CAN see looking at our galaxy from inside looking out, we can deduce the shape of the galaxy.
They shoulda put a giant mirror on Voyager 1 so that Hubble could take pictures of what it looks like looking back at us...
