Re: Ancient appeance not equal deception

"On Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:00:13 -0700, in article
<6s9l13523juhhgab5fqj29gb6rsufailfd@xxxxxxx>, Blazing.Laser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
stated..."

On 9 Apr 2007 09:47:17 -0700, TomS <TomS_member@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

By the way, in the cosmology of Dante, the center of the earth, the
very center of the universe, was Hell. I think that that was a common
view of things. Being at the center of things was not all that
wonderful.

Well if you read about this view you see that a lot of very clever and
intelligent people did a lot of thinking about it. It was not nearly
as simple as we think of it. There were four elements, and each had a
different weight, based on its nature. A rock had the lowest nature
and it fell to earth, wanting to be in the center. Water was next,
then air, then fire. Fire was spiritual and naturally wanted to
ascend to the heavens. The human body had four bodily fluids,
'humors', corresponding to the four elements. The devil only had
power in the 'sublunary realm', i.e. the earth and its atmosphere. We
humans were suspended between heaven and hell and had the potential to
move in either direction.

Beyond the sublunary realm everything was -perfect-. The sun, moon,
planets and stars lived in perfect spheres, rotated the earth in
perfect circles, moved deliberately by the hand of God. Their
existance, and their perfect paths, were a proof of God's existance.

All of this stuff (and there's a LOT more) was perfectly reasonable
considering what they had to go on.


Quite so.

But I am puzzled. I thought that you were suggesting, in that
earlier post that I was responding to, that the geocentric view
of the universe meant that earth had some preferred place as
the center of things.


--
---Tom S.
"...when men have a real explanation they explain it, eagerly and copiously and
in common speech, as Huxley freely gave it when he thought he had it."
GK Chesterton, Doubts About Darwinism (1920)

.

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