| Subject: Re: The pitiable life of an a.a.v "debunker" - Debunkers now at a credibility all time-low! |
| From: dre |
| Date: 05/09/2006, 18:42 |
| Newsgroups: alt.alien.research,alt.alien.visitors,alt.paranet.ufo,sci.skeptic |
Gee, even the Vatican recently retro-actively pardoned Gallileo, by stating
that he may have been onto something by stating that the Earth was round and
perhaps not the center of the Universe. Imagine that.
even before that...
maps made by the church showed earth as a sphere
and not flat.
as the center of the universe ...that's another
story.
but ofcourse "WE" must be portraid as stupid so
every untruth is welcome and repeated over and
over and over...by the zero cult.
Aristotle, Augustine, and others
Aristotle reiterated this in his Meteorology, and
gave reasons and calculations to show that the
stars and the heavens are also spherical. “… the
horizon always changes with a change in our
position,” he wrote, “which proves that the earth
is convex and spherical.”
Likewise, we find problems with a statement in W.
Somerset Maugham's book, Of Human Bondage. In a
conversation between Weeks and Philip in Maugham's
book, we find this comment:
St. Augustine believed that the earth was
flat and that the sun turned round it.
That's what Maugham wrote. But did Saint Augustine
believe the earth was flat?
Augustine (AD 354–430) was one of the most
prominent of the early church fathers. When we
turn to Augustine's 22-volume treatise, The City
of God (De Civitate Dei), we find that he didn't
believe the earth to be flat at all. Maugham was
wrong. Augustine did have problems accepting that
there were populated lands on the other side of
the earth — not a weird belief at all for the
time, because Australia and New Zealand, for
instance, were not known to exist — but he
acknowledged that a spherical earth seemed to have
been scientifically demonstrated.
Augustine wrote:
… although it be supposed or scientifically
demonstrated that the world is of a round and
spherical form, yet it does not follow that the
other side of the earth is bare of water; nor
even, though it be bare, does it immediately
follow that it is peopled.
Other ancient accounts
Plato, a contemporary of Aristotle and disciple of
Socrates, quoted Socrates as saying: “my
conviction is that the earth is a round body in
the center of the heavens” (Phaedo, 380 BC).
The Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17) wrote in AD 8
that God “moulded Earth into a spacious round”
(Metamorphoses, Book the First, The Creation of
the World).
Roman philosopher Plotinus (204–270) wrote in his
Six Enneads (Eighth Tractate, On the Intellectual
Beauty, section 7): “it is possible to give a
reason why the earth is set in the midst and why
it is round …”.