Reflection on the Word on the Sunday of November 21, 2021
GOD DOES NOT MOVE, THE EARTH DOES - Psalm 93 : 1-5 -
The LORD is king, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed, he is girded with strength. He has established the world; it shall never be moved; your throne is established from of old; you are from everlasting. The floods have lifted up, O LORD, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring. More majestic than the thunders of mighty waters, more majestic than the waves of the sea, majestic on high is the LORD! Your decrees are very sure; holiness befits your house, O LORD, forevermore.
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It is proven to be true that the ancient world knew that the Earth has a spherical shape. An ancient Greek scientist, the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria, called Eratosthenes, a friend of the famous Archimedes, heard, that in the ancient Egyptian city, today called Aswan, at noon, when the Sun is on the top of the Horizon on a solstice day, the objects do not have a shadow , because the Sun is completely overhead. It was not a fairy tale, it was a scientific observation, because Aswan happened to be laying on the imaginary line of the Northern Tropic, at which the Sun can be directly and factually overhead.
Assuming, that the shape of the Earth is spherical, Eratosthenes figured it out in the year around 240 BCE, that if he knows the exact distance of an other city on the same meridian on Earth and Aswan, he will be able to calculate circumference of the Earth using the proportional difference of the angles between the shadows in Aswan and his own city Alexandria in Egypt.
He had the distance between the two cities measured by professional bematists, who were specialists in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt, and were trained to measure distances by counting their steps, aka pacing. They had been also employed, hundred years before, by the army of Alexander the Great showing a high degree of accuracy.
Eratosthenes estimated that the full meridian has an approximate length of 40,320 km, which is astonishingly close to the real number, especially if we consider the simple tools he used for his calculations. Despite space travel, a sizeable crowd on Earth still believe today that the Earth is a flat but huge disk.
An other Greek scientist, Aristarchus of Samos argued as early as the third century, that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In medieval Europe for a millennia, however, they stubbornly believed that Earth is the very center of the Universe, all the planets and the Sun revolves around the Earth. This retrograde view also had some support from ancient philosophy, like Ptolemy and others.
Even Arabic philosophers consented that everything else revolves around the Earth as a center. The Earth-centered view of everything is sometimes attributed also to the most famous philosopher donkey ever lived, called Aristotle, which suggests that it was the dominant view for nearly two thousand years.
Nonetheless, the medieval church specifically insisted, swearing to the Trinity God and the Holy Mother of God otherwise known as Virgin Mary, and to the angels, and all the saints already in Heaven, and to the Holy Wounds and the Sacred Heart of Jesus himself, illuminated and fluorescent by the Holy Spirit, that the Bible is extraordinarily clear about that the Earth does not move and must be the center of the Universe, because it is written that “GOD has established the world; it shall never be moved” so says the Psalm, and so say we all, said the church.
This phrasal compound can be found not only in the 93rd Psalm, but there are also multiple similar quotes in the Bible, like the one in the Psalm 104, that God "set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved. GOD covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains." Or as it is repeated in the first Book of the Chronicles that “Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness; tremble before him, all the earth; yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.”
It was not the first time when the High Church misinterpreted core Biblical texts. According to the monolithic nature of the medieval Papacy, mistakes were regularly made and they were never corrected, because of the Papal infallibility. Even in the case of an obvious imbecibility of some rendered decisions or papal rulings, the rulings stood firm, because not really the Earth was the object which never moved, but the arrogance of the church was unmovable.
The Bible does not says that the Earth itself does not move, but the establishment of God does not move, as God does not change his mind like ever. Fortunately, but occasionally there were sensible people among the cardinals like the famous church historian Cardinal Baronius, who said that the Bible is written to show us the way how to go to Heaven and not how Heaven goes.
His stand as a cardinal, was remarkable, but it was not enough to save the life of Giordano Bruno, who was tortured, his tongue was literally cut off, he was hung upside down naked for extra humiliation, and he was burnt alive to ashes at the stake. His ashes were thrown into the River Tiberis at the age of 52, in the year of 1600.
They accused him of teaching about the Earth as it orbits around the Sun, and that the Sun is just an other star among the innumerable many, and there are also other innumerable planets out there in space, and many are inhabited. In 1942, Cardinal Giovanni Mercati stated that the Church was perfectly justified in condemning Bruno. On the 400th anniversary of Bruno's execution, in 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared that the Inquisitors "had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life". What a blatant lie!
In the same year, Pope John Paul II made a general apology for "the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth".
We can see how much value these apologies have versus real repentance and real amendments.A few decades later of the torture of the innocent Bruno, in his own trial , Galileo Galilei had to state that "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended for us to forgo their use. "
Galileo was forced to fully recant, and they kept him in house arrest for decades. The Earth moved, but the church was not shaken, they shook off reason and science, despite that their Bible interpretation was absolutely wrong, because God does not move, the Universe does, and the Earth orbits the Sun on the edge of the Galaxy, and the Sun orbits the center of the Galaxy.
Although the Bible is against of any kind of tyranny, still, during medieval centuries we let multi-generational cabals transform the original church into a czardom, into a pyramid shaped hierarchy, until Protestantism attempted to reinstate the Biblical mandate and Gospel order that Jesus is the only head of the Church, and the Blessed God is the only King in the Universe. May our hearts centered and orbit around Heaven, by the Holy Spirit, now and always, AMEN
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