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So, I must be a fool, because I will try one last time myself...
Mr. Hamilton,
So, one day Donald Hamilton wakes up and realizes the tens of thousands of physicists and astronomers don't know about atmospheric light bending and got fooled by Einstein nearly a century ago... and gave him way too much credit? As though astronomers don't know *exactly* how much an intervening gas may bend light?
Yes, an atmosphere can bend light. We see this effect twice a day, at sunrise and sunset. But has one ever noticed that it isn't perfect? That changes in density in the atmosphere cause the sun to appear lumpy instead of perfectly squashed into perfect oval? Further, even the oval isn't the amount of bending that would one would expect if the bending were from space-time being stretched by gravity. And the same would be true for starlight through the sun's corona.
Oh... and speaking of the corona, if the corona were dense enough to bend the light by that *exact amount* predicted by General Relativity, the amount of Rayleigh scattering of the sun's light, would washout any starlight coming from behind, just as it does in the earth's atmosphere. (only more so, given that the corona is right next to the ^%$#@! sun!)
But back to the *exact amount* predicted by GR, the observation has been repeated many times... but the corona is never the same twice... yet... funny that it always seems to be bending the light by the *exact amount* predicted by GR?
Oh yeah... and about those distant galaxies that are imaged by intervening galaxies, whose light has bent bent by the *exact amount* as predicted by GR? The light must have been bent by the sun's corona then too huh?
Dr. Bortz has already patiently explained most of the errors in your logic. Mr. Hamilton, your continued argumentation brings to mind two words, "crank" and "crackpot".