How can anyone look at these pictures and think that some sky god cares about them personally? Just beyond me...

@ComicDork:
'cause Cognitive Dissonance is a way of life for many folks.

Wow, the cosmic fireworks are just beautiful. Nice find.

OOOoooo, link lurve. Thanks!

Mmmm spacey porn

I don't know why, but that first picture reminds me of the best date I've ever had...

Is this a good time to tell everyone that the Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda? Get your party hats ready, in about 3 billion years we're gonna hit! :D

Glad to know I'm not the only one with a mind in the gutter. 18th birthday, galactic mergers, birth of stars, and especially the leading photo? It's an astronomical euphemism for the hibbity-jibbity!

"You come crash into me
And I come into you
I come into you
In a boys dream"

@phoenix: Thanks for the reminder that all galaxies should practice safe collisions and wear their party hats.

@TheBadAstronomer: We love your blog!

@ComicDork: How can anyone look at these pictures and think of them as a repudiation of god or religion? Just beyond me...

They're pictures of galaxies. Galaxies don't care about what you believe or don't believe in.

@russdanger: Cosmic Rorschach test?

when I viewed the images NASA released, all I could think of is the civilizations that where in the path of destruction that would be wiped out by the flood of cosmic rays bathing their homeworld. To be fair, I also contemplated the worlds that would be dusted with interstellar matter seeding them with life.

@Signal:

I don't tell my brain what to do, and it doesn't try to run my life. It's an arrangement that's worked out pretty well so far...
The second to last one is another of my favorites. I'm thinking young hottie Liz Taylor...

@ComicDork:

Perhaps the Sky God shows us it's beauty as a sign of it's affection for us, and our sense of mystery and wonder is it's greatest gift...

@russdanger: Uh, no. You're missing the bigger picture: Space is VAST. Vast beyond our comprehension of it. To believe that some sky-god has come to this planet--which isn't even a speck in the vastness of space--and personally taken an interest or sent his 'son' (who is really him, but nevermind that) to die for our 'sins' (like not being nice to out of towners which is why he destroyed Sodom & Gamorrah) is just well... silly.

'god' made sense when it was us, the beasts & the trees, but now that we know our place in the Cosmos? Sorry, biblical sky-gods are appear to be what they always were: simple explanations for people without science.

Hurtling galaxies as an awesome weapon: Just as cool as pool with planets and a blackhole! Oh, Red Dwarf...

I think i have an idea of what it would take... Freaking huge katapults!

Hmmm...colliding galaxies. Some intelligent design.

@ComicDork:

Perhaps there is a picture that's even bigger than the bigger picture. Suppose that the entirety of the universe itself is a single vast intelligence, to it's constituent particles it would seem as vast and incomprehensible as a blue whale to a ribosome in one of it's cells...
I think that you might be assuming that I've been speaking about that zany 0ld-Testament dude with the Locusts and the big beard...We're talkin' about the Force here, son, try to keep up...

@russdanger: Nerve impulses limited to c?

@denisegp: I'm an advocate of safe galactic collision, what can I say? ;)

All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

@physik: may all be touched by his most noodley appendage...

@Mathmos:

I'm not sure that I understand the reference. Are you suggesting that there's something wrong with my hard-drive?
Might be true, did a lot to bang it around in my younger days...

The debate really shouldn't be about whether it is logical to believe in some sort of supreme being, but whether it's logical to believe in the Western monotheistic God of the Torah/Bible/Koran...

Can we not just look at the pretty crashes and not talk about god/atheism/duckism/whateverism? you might aswell look at a car crash and go "aaah god doesn't exist! crashy crashy!" just go and read HHGTG and chill out :P

although that first picture is hauntingly beautiful, even if its incomprehensible in scale.

I think one of the amazing things about Hubble is that it allows us to perceive the Universe with a slightly different relativity. Galactic-scale events -should- humble us. These pictures do seem to prompt ideas both philosophic and-or religious, probably because the human psyche has for most of its evolutionary existence only had one way of relating to this kind of power. Which is to say we may have a hard-wired propensity to think "God/s" when we encounter something that should make us feel very small, and insignificant and powerless. But at the same time we can also realize we are the Universe, a part that has awoken and says, "Gosh, I'm awesome. This is what I am. All of it." I Grok it on a perfect spring day like this.