"Wake up fundies!!!"

I stumbled upon this thread on the web last night, and couldn't help but comment. I must!

Maybe the person who had tagged this post only liked it because of being an astronomy buff or something, or thought the little scale planet models were cool, and didn't actually agree with the original poster's reasoning (for which you have to read all the way to the end..), I don't really know.

Regardless, I couldn't help feeling like I'd heard this line of argument somewhere before. Hmmm...

Turns out I had. About 3,000 years ago, my soon-to-be patron saint had roughly the same question: in light of the vastness of the universe, what would God care about puny little us, anyway?

Now, when the poster (from Uruguay, yet. hm. the internet sure makes the world smaller! it almost feels like the size of those little models..) was looking at these pictures and writing this thread, he/she must have thought (s)he was being original, I suppose. But, no. No real new thought here, just a remix of a lot of other people's musings over the millennia.

For example, the poster took the same sense of awe & wonder & incomprehensibility at the thought of the universe compared to us (v.3-4 below), but just came up with a very different conclusion than did the poet-king, David.

And as usual.. I prefer the original to the remix. :)



Psalm 8

For the director of music. According to gittith.

A psalm of David.

1 O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.

2 From the lips of children and infants
you have ordained praise
because of your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.

3 When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,

4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

5 You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.

6 You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:

7 all flocks and herds,
and the beasts of the field,

8 the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.

9 O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!



So one person looks at the vast universe and says: "look at this! There is no god who could possibly care about us." Another person looks at the same vastness and says: "how amazing! God's love and care for us is as vast as all this.."

What do you think?