Ann O'Maly

Photo by Steve Bronstein, an advertising photographer.

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He describes how he designed/produced the shot. (Psst, it's photographic art - not real.)

Read full article HERE.

The Saturday Review, Sept. 17, 1859, p. 340 [paragraphs added for ease of reading]: "We should not have thought it worth while to notice Mr. Hislop's lucubrations if his book had not reached a second edition, and thus revealed the melancholy intellectual condition of a portion at least of the British public. For the sake of this class of readers, it may perhaps not be amiss to state gravely why we dissent from his line of argument. "In the first place, his whole superstructure is raised upon nothing. Our earliest authority for the history of Semiramis wrote about the commencement of the Christian era, and the historian from whom he drew his information lived from fifteen hundred to two thousand years after the date which Mr. Hislop assigns to the great Assyrian Queen. The most lying legend which the Vatican has ever endorsed stands on better authority than the history which is now made the ground of a charge against it. "Secondly, the whole argument proceeds upon the assumption that all heathenism has a common origin. Accidental resemblances in mythological details are taken as evidence of this, and nothing is allowed for the natural working of the human mind. "Thirdly, Mr. Hislop's reasoning would make anything of anything. By the aid of obscure passages in third-rate historians, groundless assumptions of identity, and etymological torturing of roots, all that we know, and all that we believe, may be converted, as if by the touch of Harlequin's wand, into something totally different. "Fourthly, Mr. Hislop's argument proves too much. He finds not only the corruptions of Popery, but the fundamental articles of the Christian Faith, in his hypothetical Babylonian system. ... "... But it is idle to speak seriously of a book which only claims attention by its matchless absurdity, and by the fact that it apparently finds readers. We take leave of Mr. Hislop and his work with the remark that we never before quite knew the folly of which ignorant or half-learned bigotry is capable." Link to full review -

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Another world famous Catholic who suffered doubts ... ... in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,--Listen and do not hear--the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me--that I let Him have [a] free hand." [...] The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever--or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist." That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and--except for a five-week break in 1959--never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. ...

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How does the Bible resolve the question of whether Allah is identified as a moon god? This about Nimrod and his family filling a void and starting a new religious system isn't in the Bible. Where did you get that idea from? Modern eyes or not, Hislop produced a work based on false premises, false history, false or tenuous associations, thereby resulting in false conclusions. I'll repost what Hislop's contemporaries thought about his book: The Saturday Review, Sept. 17, 1859 (link to full review): "We should not have thought it worth while to notice Mr. Hislop's lucubrations if his book had not reached a second edition, and thus revealed the melancholy intellectual condition of a portion at least of the British public. For the sake of this class of readers, it may perhaps not be amiss to state gravely why we dissent from his line of argument. "In the first place, his whole superstructure is raised upon nothing. Our earliest authority for the history of Semiramis wrote about the commencement of the Christian era, and the historian from whom he drew his information lived from fifteen hundred to two thousand years after the date which Mr. Hislop assigns to the great Assyrian Queen. The most lying legend which the Vatican has ever endorsed stands on better authority than the history which is now made the ground of a charge against it. "Secondly, the whole argument proceeds upon the assumption that all heathenism has a common origin. Accidental resemblances in mythological details are taken as evidence of this, and nothing is allowed for the natural working of the human mind. "Thirdly, Mr. Hislop's reasoning would make anything of anything. By the aid of obscure passages in third-rate historians, groundless assumptions of identity, and etymological torturing of roots, all that we know, and all that we believe, may be converted, as if by the touch of Harlequin's wand, into something totally different. "Fourthly, Mr. Hislop's argument proves too much. He finds not only the corruptions of Popery, but the fundamental articles of the Christian Faith, in his hypothetical Babylonian system. ... "... But it is idle to speak seriously of a book which only claims attention by its matchless absurdity, and by the fact that it apparently finds readers. We take leave of Mr. Hislop and his work with the remark that we never before quite knew the folly of which ignorant or half-learned bigotry is capable." - p. 340 [paragraphs added for ease of reading] This, in reality, is Hislop's "valuable contribution." Are you suggesting that the 'God of Truth' (Ps. 31:5) had a hand in disseminating falsehood? Yes, go ahead, Allen. Make my day.

Umm ... this is what Kurt opened this thread with. We've just been discussing some of its claims! To hide a connection, you first have to establish a connection. A connection between Allah-worship and moon-god-worship has not been established. Therefore, there is no connection to hide. As an aside, Allen mentioned Dagan and an alleged identification as a fish-god. A reputable academic summary on Dagan is at

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. Please note: "A 4th century AD tradition which places Dagan as a fish deity is erroneous (Black and Green 1998: 56)."

Likewise, I do not post on this for your benefit; I post because it's an aid for any interested readers to navigate through fact and fiction, or at least see another perspective. They can form their own conclusions. Maybe on your planet. Here on Earth, Halaal just means 'lawful' or 'permissible.' You did? I thought that was the OP and me. I must have missed it. Who in their right mind would try to claim the Hebrew noun 'el' means 'the'?

Vaguely waving your finger around at 140 years' worth of archaeology and saying I'm uniformed tells me nothing. Which archaeological findings directly indicate Allah was considered a moon god by Muslims? Are you able to cite any credible research? This also tells me nothing. Where are the links between crescent-shaped trinkets that ancient, pre-Islamic polytheists wore on the one hand, and Allah and moon worship in monotheistic Islam on the other? There is a huge evidential and logical chasm you need to fill here. So show me the verse in the Quran that is inconsistent with the thoughts in 41:37 (also cf. 7:54 and 13:2). Does the Quran suggest anywhere that moon worship is OK and that Allah is a moon god? This isn't consistent with your claim about Allah = moon god. If Mohammad was trying to get his people away from idol worship, why make the moon an idol, and why distinguish between the two? He didn't change god's name. As was mentioned before, Allah is etymologically related to the Semitic El - a generic designation for 'god' or 'deity.' See

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. So Al-ilah literally just means 'the God.' Of course not. The moon and stars are part of humanity's collective memory. They are constants in the night sky. And the Arabs, incidentally, were phenomenally good astronomers who contributed to our scientific understanding of the cosmos. Anyway, so far, I've found your arguments for an Allah-moon god identity to be based on little more than thin air, I'm afraid.

"The Money's Always Right!"

The researcher was debunking a work because of his shoddy research. You make it out like there is a consensus of scholarship that takes the view that Muslims worship a moon god called Allah. There isn't. It's a smear campaign against Islam propagated by some fundamentalist, evangelical groups. What about it? It doesn't mean Allah was considered a moon god. OK. So where is the archaeological evidence for Allah being identified as the moon god? It was inherited and taken over from the Ottoman empire in the middle ages. How do the symbols on a flag prove that Muslims worship the moon god? What about it? How is this relevant? The smoking gun from their own writings is that Allah cannot be a moon god and that Muslims are not permitted to worship the moon. "And of His signs are the night and day and the sun and moon. Do not prostrate to the sun or to the moon, but prostate to Allah, who created them, if it should be Him that you worship." - Quran 41:37

The 'research' that allegedly says Allah is the moon god is apparently bogus, as indicated above. Or do you know of an archaeological 'smoking gun' that directly links them? I only saw in your post hops, skips and wide jumps to tenuous connections between crescent shaped trinkets which were the fashion among some ancient Semitic civilizations and to some modern-day, controversial, work of fiction.

I can't believe nobody's said this yet: THAT'S NO MOON ...

Yes there are. And there are wrong choices no matter how we thought about them at the time. To help prevent the negativity about ourselves spiraling into feelings of worthlessness after we've messed up (which often happens when we have been raised and/or surrounded by people who expect near perfection of us and pick up on every real or perceived fault), accept that we will get things wrong and make idiots of ourselves at times... and that's OK. Making mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow - sometimes we learn more from getting things wrong than by doing everything right all the time. And as for the 'soy sauce' incident? A sense of humor would have gone a long way to get over it.

I guess all astronomers can do is continue observing, collecting data, and refining. If they can improve their knowledge on how 'dark' matter and energy affect the universe's expansion rate, the predictions based on Cosmic Microwave Background will better harmonize with the results yielded from the 'standard candle' method. Prof. Riess explained, “Ultimately, when Gaia is done, we ought to be able to measure the Hubble Constant to 1% precision. That’s the same precision that is predicted by the Cosmic Microwave Background. That will be really powerful. "And if there is a discrepancy, if there's something interesting going on in the dark sector of the Universe, it should give us much better evidence of what that is”.