what makes the Persian sun painting so unique?

Don't want to pursue the off-topic, but you both might be interested to read David Baddiel's The God Desire: a short book, partly addressing Dawkins, my only problem with it is that I wish Baddiel hadn't felt it necessary to include the ubiquitous "F word": he only does it once, but I found it irritatingly unnecessary and just a touch childish.  However - he suggests .... well, you'd need to read it yourselves.

Baddiel, pretty much sums it up in my opinion.

Don't want to pursue the off-topic, but you both might be interested to read David Baddiel's The God Desire: a short book, partly addressing Dawkins, my only problem with it is that I wish Baddiel hadn't felt it necessary to include the ubiquitous "F word": he only does it once, but I found it irritatingly unnecessary and just a touch childish.  However - he suggests .... well, you'd need to read it yourselves.

If you want to, please summarise it for me.

Can't summarise books, even short ones.  From the blurb: "David Baddiel would love there to be a God.  He has spent a lot of time fantasising about how much better life would be if there actually was a Superhero Dad who chased off death.  Unfortunately for him, there isn't.  Or at least this is Baddiel's view in this book, which argues that it is the very intensity of the human desire for  God to exist that proves his non-existence." I don't find his arguments particularly persuasive, to be honest, and I don't believe his book will either challenge faith or deepen it - but I did find the proposition interesting.  If ever I wrote a book on the subject - most unlikely to happen: Baddiel is published because he's Baddiel, television personality (why do I feel an urge to add "a contradiction in terms"?) and I'm just as good a writer as he is, AND more beautifully marked - I would suggest that religion is a very human art-form, expressed in various ways between and within the various denominations and themes.  I felt that when I was religious, and still do now I'm not: which is why I can still be moved by the  Easter ritual when the Pope pronounces the Urbi et Orbi blessing, and why I regret the fact that since John Paul Ist's time, they no longer sing or chant it - it has dulled-down the ritual which was an inescapable part of the art-form. 

After I wrote that I realised I could just look up a summary online. Baddiels book seems like an intelligent reflection on the question of belief and I think a fair one-line summary might be "People are afraid of dying and therefore strongly motivated to believe in an afterlife, and a superhero daddy figure who will one day right all of life's many injustices." He also gives this little equation: "Desire + invisibility = God". He writes a lot about his Jewish identity too and how it colours his atheism. I don't know if he tackles the possibility that many people may desire that God does not exist, perhaps because they fear punishment for their real or imagined sins. But let's stick with his idea. Personally, I've gone from simple faith to atheism to true belief and I've had just about every spiritual experience you've heard of. In fact it's not a question of belief for me. I know God exists, just as strongly as Baddiel says he knows God doesn't exist - more strongly, in fact, because God revealed Himself to me. I know I'm more than a skin-encapsulated ego and that although my brain certainly is a "computer made of meat", my mind is something else. It's a foolish thing for an atheist like Baddiel to say he "knows" God doesn't exist, because he bases his position on lack of evidence. But as any scientist will tell him, the lack of evidence for something is not proof of its non-existence, just that it hasn't yet been found by them. Another problem with the scientific method is that it works in such a way as to virtually guarantee that the supernatural will not be found, because it is simply a method of examining the natural world, ie, it isn't looking for the supernatural in the first place. Our connection to the supernatural comes through the mind, with which science has major issues, even though many physicists will tell you that the incredibly strange implications of many experiments in quantum mechanics point inexorably to an entanglement between the experiment and the experimenter. It's also now known that information is more fundamental than energy and many scientists believe that a field of potentially infinite information underlies everything. There is also the incredible work of transpersonal psychologists such as Stanislav Grof, who use techniques like Holotropic Breathwork to take people on adventures in consciousness, where past lives can be accessed, problems resolved that have resisted years of psychoanalysis and the consciousness of animals, plants and even inanimate objects experienced.  The real issue with Baddiel is that he is blocked from experiencing God because of his deep and likely mostly unconscious belief in scientific naturalism, or something like it. It's not lack of belief in God that's the problem with most atheists I know. It's a positive belief, often unconscious, in an intellectual system that has no place for God and sometimes an even more unconscious desire to escape from God in the first place. But as a belief system naturalism has cracks and that is where God is to be found winking at us. For example, I have had hundreds of precognitive dreams and visions. At a stroke that disproves (for me) scientific naturalism and materialism as a philosophy.  This was going to be the start of a long post on the subject, but it's seriously off topic and I think it would be better if I ended it more artistically. All you have to know is that the Greek and Hebrew system of numbering words can also be applied to modern English. These are pictorial representations of John's claim in the New Testament that Jesus Christ was the Word Incarnate. Since there is no reason why numerical geometry should agree with the claims in a dusty old book, we have either an amazing series of coincidences (and there are volumes of them) or language has been supernaturally guided to align with geometry. Anyway, that's my last post on the subject. Back to the art!

For heaven's sake (pun intended!), this is an art site. Stick to comments about art - your personal beliefs are of no interest to anyone but you and have no place on here. 

For heaven's sake (pun intended!), this is an art site. Stick to comments about art - your personal beliefs are of no interest to anyone but you and have no place on here. 

I know it was seriously off topic, but as I just wrote, that's my last word here on the subject. 

If anything so absurdly off topic is posted like this again, I’m going to remove it… Let’s stick to art related topics in future please!