The Catholic Message Board

For years, I have made the joke about someone who is so disagreeable that if I said the sky is blue, the response would be "not at night, you liar!"

I was talking to someone defending the SSPX, insisting that the recent excommunications weren't valid because "reasons blah blah blah," and I said, "At this point, the SSPX would reject anything the Pope said, even if he were to say that the sky is blue"

And the response I got was that the sky ISN'T blue at all; at night it appears black, and under the right conditions it can look orange or even pink, and I was given a mini-lecture on Rayleigh Scattering, which is that gases in the atmosphere cause light to scatter in all directions, and that the sky appears blue because blue has the shortest wavelenght of all the colors, causing the color blue to scatter around more than any other color making the sky on a sunny day appear blue...

This guy actually made the satirical response I have joked about for years....

"The sky is blue" is not a literal statement of fact, of course, but it is just a proverbial way of saying that a fact is clear, something no reasonable person would deny.

I sincerely hope this response wasn't serious....

In the family my wife and I raised, the color of the sky could have been a rousing dinner table topic. I would have had the following to say:
It is fashionable to deconstruct common sense notions and reduce truths to mere subjective events that vary from person to person. In this case, however, I maintain that there is objective truth to the sky's being blue. First, by "sky" we don't mean outer space, nor clouds, nor smoke in the air. We mean the air above us as normally seen when we look up, the substance above us, ignoring the "accidents" of clouds and airplanes. Next, just as we say that a ripe orange is still orange in a dark room and has not turned black, we are referring to its appearance when light shines on it. And not just any light, since light of one set of wavelengths will reflect off an object differently than light of another set of wavelengths. We mean the light of our sun, and we could even specify at noon if someone wanted an exact blue (but we don't).
Don't pity the children that were around our dinner table. They might dispute, but they were learning to think, I think.