17 thoughts on “Neil DeGrasse Tyson”

  1. “…but I suspect his ego will just cause him to continue to ignore the criticism.”

    Which he can do so long as there are no negative consequences resulting from his buffoonery…

    Neil DeGaseous Buffoon

      1. “In billions upon billions of ways.” Did I get the accent right? I couldn’t resist such a straight line.

  2. President Bush, famously with his “Islam is a religion of peace” remark, took the road that we have Muslim allies in the fight against international terrorism rather than a specific religion being at the root cause and especially condusive to it, which is the road followed by many right-wing Internet commentators opposed to President Bush.

    That President Bush, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the same President Bush who included mosques in his list of American places of worship in his First Inaugural, said anything that could be interpreted as orphaning, distancing, or separating Islam from the other two major religions tracing their origins to Abraham, such an assertion is at odds with the historical record.

    1. Well said. Those other cited stories of Tyson I can write off as just rhetorical flourishes. But this is different. This is a named person that he is effectively accusing of religious prejudice against Muslims.
      I wonder how the left would respond to this if someone had just made up a similar quote about Obama.

      Bob Clark

  3. “It sure isn’t getting any smarter out there.”

    For who? Are you disrespecting both George W “Islam is a religion of peace” Bush as well as Neil “President Bush disrespected Islam” DeGrasse Tyson?

    I am in the camp that the greatest number of victims of international terrorism are of the Muslim faith and the only chance of success is to build relations with allies fighting the terrorists whatever their religion. Which was the basis of David Petraeus’ COIN strategy. Go ahead, call us all stupid . . .

    1. Muslims are people. People are all over the map but we all have more in common than we have differences. However, Muslims are people of Islamic faith. That faith is pure evil which is why most Muslims support the uncivilized behavior of the so called radicals. Those radicals are in perfect alignment with mainstream Islam.

      You can believe the lie that Islam is peaceful,but understand they mean when everyone else is dead.

      1. At Mom’s funeral, I selected the Psalm that goes “By the waters of Babylon I sat and wept as I thought of Zion.” I chose that because she had been displaced from homeland and kept separated from it her entire adult life. I matched this sorrowful reading with one from the joyous prophesy of Revelation Chapter 21, as it is a tenant of more than one faith tradition that our hope is in being made whole for deprivations in this life.

        Sis politely reminded me that we never read this Psalm in its entirety because it concludes with a graphic description of a retribution to happen to the oppressor who had caused this exile to be, which includes devastation upon, shall we say, the innocent civilian population.

        I don’t think you can hold verses in holy writ of Judaism and Christianity of this nature against their adherents, and I don’t hold similar writings against followers of Islam.

        In conduct of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), we as Americans and through our government have made promises to persons of the Muslim faith, recruiting many as allies in a war that affects them as it affects us, offering protection from in many cases serious danger to those outside our borders by choosing to ally with us.

        Without getting into the debate about “faith” vs “works righteousness, there is a religous teaching that holds that what is in the heart of each individual person is of greater significance than the particular correctness or errors in the formal religious observance of that person. There are multiple Bible quotations supporting this view, starting with the parable of the Samaritan man who rescues another man beaten by robbers.

        There is enough evil to go around in the Islamic world, starting with the Islamic State, and I don’t shirk from calling the IS evil. We need to fight this evil, I don’t know how, but the view that “Islam is intrinsically evil” and we should step back and “let ‘them’ fight each other”, a view that I see coming from the Libertarian Right, is something I reject.

        We have allies in the Islamic world whose societies are organized around the principle of honor before the question of religious faith comes into play. Let us reciprocate honor with honor and cut out the loose theological discussions.

        1. Yes, we need allies in the Muslim world.

          Yes, you can hold verses in holy writ of Judaism and Christianity of this nature against their adherents exactly because they are adherents.

          this Psalm … concludes with a graphic description of a retribution to happen to the oppressor who had caused this exile to be, which includes devastation upon, shall we say, the innocent civilian population.

          There is a huge difference between retribution by God and Jihad by adherents. God alone decides who’s innocent (hint: none of us) which is why he provided a ransom.

          our government have made promises

          Which is worse than the typical politicians lies because they are making them in our name. For example, I do not forgive GWB for the promises he made to Georgia.

          How we fight Islam can only be answered after we actually decide to fight Islam. Islam is already fighting the entire world… including China and Russia. I see this linked to the prophesy that government will soon turn on all religions (w/o exception.) It may be nearly impossible to imagine, but the bible has a good track record on such things.

          We agree that evil must be fought.

  4. We can allow that people occasionally misspeak, but wouldn’t life be better if so many didn’t outright lie and defame? So…

    [Neil DeGrasse Tyson says that George W. Bush said,] “Our God” — of course it’s actually the same God, but that’s a detail, let’s hold that minor fact aside for the moment. Allah of the Muslims is the same God as the God of the Old Testament.

    First, Allah is a name. God, like Lord or King, is a descriptive title. So if I renamed GWB to Jim, then lied about what he did or said, would I be talking about the same person?

    The bible does record a name for god (Ps 83:18) thousands of times in what is called the tetragrammaton. Controversy about how to pronounce it is a different issue.

    Allah is not the same God as JHWH of the bible and it is slanderous to say so.

    BTW, Jesus also has pronunciation variations which corresponds to Jehova as Yahweh corresponds to Yeshua.

    Names do matter. Yes, we even name the stars.

    1. In “The Last Battle,” Shift the Ape tells his followers that Tash (the vulture-headed god of death) is merely another name for Aslan. Of course, Shift does not believe in either Tash or Aslan, but is simply trying to maintain his own authority. Tyson is in the same position.

      Tyson plays a rhetorical trick when he says “the God of the Old Testament.” He’s putting aside all that messy business about the Trinity and only referencing the God of the Old Testament, who he identifies as Allah.

      That’s based on a common assumption, among those who have not studied the Bible, that Jesus only appears in the New Testament and the God of the a Old Testament is a God the Father. But anyone who reads the Old and New Testaments together will find Jesus is present throughout. The first line of Genesis says God created the heavens and the earth, but it does not identify which person — the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost — was responsible. The Gospel of John clarifies that it was Jesus.

      If Tyson is not a Christian, he can say this is all so much rubbish, but he should not misrepresent other people’s beliefs. Christians do not believe the universe was created by Allah.

  5. I read Narnia all in one go as a teenager. I can’t even remember the characters or stories now.

    Yes Edward, that point is made in many bible text outside of John but it’s more than the heavens and the earth. All the angels, who all existed before the heavens, were created by god’s master worker.

    You’d think people would consider what ‘only begotten son’ means.

    he should not misrepresent

    Is basically all that needs to be said.

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