"Don't take away people's hope"

[Anomalocaris]

Boy, making every word mean something else when applied to god sure clears things up.

I mean, just look at how well it works when applied to you!

Atlas bed peacock rock salt pined.

The west lifted itself up with the judicious use of organized violence, Atlas.  We tell stories about our loftier pursuits to contextualize our ascendancy and dominance in more self serving terms.

Without the efforts of many western scientists that resulted from the competition with the Ottoman empire, that ascendancy would've never got achieved. I agree with you but it is not violence and ruthlessness alone that ensured the victory of the west over the east: the Mongols were more ruthless but they didn't achieve anything notable aside from eating civilizations.

Actually, the trans-Euroasian route of historically unprecedented ease of commerce and trade that the Mongols created  contributed at least as much to later rise of the west as did the later competition with Turkish east.   The fact that Mongol's almost squashed Islam like a bug (from which the Islamic world is still smarting) and the fact that Islam proved less able to profit in the long run from the brief freedom of transcontinental trade, commerce and flow of techniques and ideas than the westn does not give Islam the right to minimize the enormous positive influence the Mongols for all their brutality was able to exert on the world in general in the long run, nor the the vital role the Mongol played in putting the west onto the path of modernity several centuries later.

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It doesn't reflect light or emit it; so you're forced to picture it as a "void" until we discover a way to see it.
In other words:you can't imagine it.

Only ignoramus divorced from the illuminating influence of 4 centuries of modern science can believe what one could see with his eyes takes precedence over what one can measure with one's instruments, or visualizing the behavior of a substance some of whose properties can be pinned down requires a sight picture of it.


We can imagine dark matter because we can measure its mass and distribution with our instruments.