cogito

I am amazed at the fact that one can be an astronomer and an atheist. As technology enables us to behold beauty once hidden hundreds of light-years away, it reminds us how vast this universe really is. My faith is continually bolstered by the Divine creativity on display in the the heavens, and the scale on which God has stretched his canvas. Conversely, it should give us pause to think about how incredibly finite we are.

Consider our galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s between 80,000 and 100,000 light-years in diameter. One light-year is 5,878,625,373,183 miles. To put it in perspective, if you shrunk the Milky Way to 80 miles, our solar system would be 2 millimeters wide.

The Milky Way has numerous smaller “satellite galaxies”, and one of them is called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Apparently, the LMC is easily visible to the naked eye far south of the Equator (e.g., Australia, etc.). Through a telescope, however, the LMC is dominated by a cloud of gas called the Tarantula Nebula. The Tarantula Nebula was thought to be a star until 1751, when Nicolas Louis de Lacaille said hey, that’s a nebula!

This nebula is 160,000 light-years away, but is still about as bright to the eye as the Orion Nebula (which is 30 light-years away). It’s huge; approximately 1700 light-years across, (50x Orion)! If the Tarantula were placed at the distance of the Orion nebula, it would fill half the sky. And, to get back to my point, it’s beautiful:

That photo above is from the European Southern Observatory. They stitched together a 256 megapixel image of the nebula and have a variety of sizes available to download. It definitely confirms Psalm 19:1:

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

I recommend heading over there and checking out a larger version of the image. Spend a moment considering the magnitude of that masterwork, so vast to us, yet just a little speck in the cosmos.

(via Bad Astronomy.)

Related: The Big Bang & Blind Faith

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UPDATE: I do not think that soy is linked to homosexuality. It seems I may not have been clear enough on that fact. That said, I’m in the process of writing a clearer, better researched piece about soy and its effects on hormones and development. Check back soon.

You’re probably thinking what I first thought: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I just came across a post at Right Wing Watch that criticizes WorldNetDaily.com for publishing this article about soy being linked to femininity and - in men - homosexuality. [Read more →]

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This website has compiled all of the State of the Union addresses in U.S. history and then analyzed them, visualizing the most-used words in a “tag cloud.” Very interesting and surprisingly telling.

Check it out: U.S. Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud

There is a little slider in the upper-right that allows you to scroll backwards in time through different presidents and speeches. Something that immediately jumped out at me was the frequency of the word “Constitution” in the earlier speeches, and its complete absence in recent years. Starting in about 1990, the word “Constitution” doesn’t show up in any of the speeches. Should that tell us something?

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Perhaps this is just an example of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, but ever since I wrote an article about Christianity and government, I have been seeing the topic everywhere. For example, there was just recently an article in the Harding Bison entitled, “Whatever Happened to Christian Pacifism?” It’s a slightly different topic than I dealt with in my article, but I think the articles support one another to a large degree. The author - Keith Stanglin - introduces his piece with a quote from J.N. Armstrong, the first president of Harding University.

We cannot join in the hating, the bitterness, but must keep the spirit of Christ, and try to heal the wounds of the world in the love of men. The problems of the world are not ours to solve. Whether our statesmen in putting the nation into war are wise or otherwise is not ours to decide.We are sojourners and pilgrims, strangers on our way home.So we Christians are not in the war; it is not our war. We are not on either side.

Stanglin does a good job of criticizing the “method of discourse” (moral dilemmas, proof texts, etc.) in the debate between pacifists and just war advocates. It’s a thought-provoking piece. I look forward to exploring the concept of Christian pacifism (vs. “just war”) in the course of broadening my original article on Christian citizenship (or, a case for Christian Libertarianism).

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