Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Doug Shaver · 09-12-2007, 07:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by krosero

I've started asking people what they remember being taught about Columbus in grade school. The 3 people I've asked (from a secular, a Christian and a Muslim background) all say that Columbus had trouble finding support for his voyages because of a belief that the earth was flat and that he would fall off the edge of the earth.

I heard it in grade school.

I even heard it from a history instructor during my freshman year in college, but by that time I'd learned it wasn't true. I tried disputing him, but I couldn't remember my source or any other specifics, so I didn't really have an argument against him.

Amedeo · 09-12-2007, 08:43 AM

P.S. to # 286 -- concerning Medieval DARKNESS in the internal affairs of countries. Now: internal affairs of the Church (of Christendom).

In the 12th century (during the High Middle Ages), troubles arose around the papal see. The troubles were not of a theological nature, but of a political nature, for the Medieval popes were the holders of two keys: religious doctrine power and temporal [secular, political] power. {{Whereas there occurred a renaissance or religion in Italy during the 13th century, there was no ecclesiastical reformation. Indeed I mentioned, in the Renaissance post, that the establishment of the papal see at Avignon in the 14th century was a symbolic element of the Italian renaissance, along with the death of the last Holy Roman Emperor who descended unto Italian soil. // The church "reformation" occurred in Europe by some countries splitting from the Roman Church as Protestants or by the schism between the Latin-rite Church and the Greek-rite Church, which became the "Orthodox" Church.}}

Popes and anti-popes were elected by different factions of cardinals. A case in point concerns Anacletus II and Innocent II. From Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopedia:

Quote:

...... In 1130, as Pope Honorius II lay dying, the cardinals decided to entrust the election to a commission of eight men, led by papal chancellor Haimeric, who had his candidate Cardinal Gregory Papareschi hastily elected as Pope Innocent II. He was consecrated on February 14, the day after Honorius' death. The other cardinals announced that Innocent had not been canonically elected and chose Cardinal Pietro Pierleoni, a Roman whose family were the enemy of Haimeric's supporters, the Frangipani, who took the name Pope Anacletus II. Anacletus' mixed group of supporters were powerful enough to take control of Rome while Innocent was forced to flee North; legally speaking Anacletus was the canonically elected Pope and Innocent was the anti-Pope.

Anacletus had control of Rome, so Innocent II took ship for Pisa, and thence sailed by Genoa to France, where the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux readily secured his cordial recognition by the clergy and the court; in October of the same year he was duly acknowledged by Lothar II of Germany and his bishops at the synod of Würzburg........

Incidentally, Bernard of Clairvaux [later, Saint] was the powerful Cluniac monk to whom the Templars who had gone to Jerusalem reported that they had found and secured what they were looking for. [In fact, I have found out that a building at Axum, Ethiopia, bears the insignia (distinctive cross, etc.) of the Templars, as I pointed out in "Here Lies the Ark."]

Which was the pope and which was the anti-pope?
Here is another account:

Quote:

Antipope Anacletus II
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anacletus II, born Pietro Pierleoni, (d. January 25, 1138) was an Antipope who ruled from 1131 to his death, in a schism against the contested hasty election of Pope Innocent II.

Pietro, of Jewish descent, was born to the powerful Roman family of the Pierleoni, the son of the Consul Pier Leoni. As a second son with ambitions he was destined for the Church. He studied in Paris and entered the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny. Later he went to Rome and occupied several important positions. In 1130, Pope Honorius II lay dying and the cardinals decided that they would entrust the election to a commission of eight men, led by papal chancellor Haimeric, who had his candidate Cardinal Gregory Papareschi hastily elected as Pope Innocent II. He was consecrated on February 14, the day after Honorius' death. The other cardinals announced that Innocent had not been canonically elected and chose Cardinal Pietro Pierleoni, a Roman whose family were the enemy of Haimeric's supporters the Frangipani. Anacletus' supporters were a mixture of anyone opposed to Haimeric making him powerful enough to take control of Rome while Innocent was forced to flee North; legally speaking Anacletus was the canonically elected Pope and Innocent was the anti-Pope..................

There is at least one man who declares that Innocent II is the antipope [Antipope Innocent II] and that he is against Innocent II as pope [anti-(Pope Innocent II)]. In either case, he is of the same nationality as Anacletus and inveighs against the Italian one. Playing ethnic politics!

Incidentally, the Cluniac monastery may be derived from the Benedictine Order of Italy (I mentioned before), but it had none of that "pray and work" policy; it was a secularized and feudal institution. The non-Italian monasticism -- I repeat -- became part of the Medieval Darkness.

Brother Daniel · 09-12-2007, 10:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amedeo

There is at least one man who declares that Innocent II is the antipope [Antipope Innocent II] and that he is against Innocent II as pope [anti-(Pope Innocent II)]. In either case, he is of the same nationality as Anacletus and inveighs against the Italian one. Playing ethnic politics!

You're really determined to dig your own grave, aren't you?

Amedeo · 09-12-2007, 11:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brother Daniel

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amedeo

There is at least one man who declares that Innocent II is the antipope [Antipope Innocent II] and that he is against Innocent II as pope [anti-(Pope Innocent II)]. In either case, he is of the same nationality as Anacletus and inveighs against the Italian one. Playing ethnic politics!

You're really determined to dig your own grave, aren't you?

No DIGGING of graves...
Once I had an astonishing dream. A large streatch of land was a fantastically tree--decorated cemetary. Then there were crypts and I walked down. In a very large room was practically filled with coffins, which had a small glass window on top. As I walked, I looked through one of those windows and I saw myself lying there. The coffin bore the date of May 2, but no year was present... which kept me puzzling after I woke up.

Waking up is a daily resurrection and nobody has the brain resources to bury me. That's why they resort to defamation -- the tool of the weak.

Amedeo · 09-12-2007, 08:12 PM

BRIEF OUTLINE OF HISTORICAL COSMOGRAPHY
-- for any curious general reader, not a reply to the hopeless in "reading comprehension" or punchers of holes in waters --

(In order to avoid current confusions, let us momentarily ignore the words "earth" and "universe.")

(A) The Pristine World

In the beginning, a man stood on a mountain (or esperientially build up to this point) and saw LAND around him, with plains and mountains, volcanoes and rivers, and a surrounding SEA. He saw the SKY with its moving sun or, at night, a multitude of stars.

The sky was like a dome or a half a sphere -- to use own own language. The earth and the sea were uneven, but they were generally flat, as compared to the sky.

To use our own language, his WORLD was a hemisphere. This is the pristine world, of which he knew innumerable details. But for instance, he did not know how deep the land was. However, since vulcanos emitted fire, he INFERRED [by analogy with certain things and situations of his daily life], that it must be quite thick and includes what is not normally evident. There are also caves that go deep down: There are underworld habitats.

This Pristine world was for all intents and purposed the world, for the unlearned people before the 17 century. Thereafter, the divulgation of science, increase in universal schooling, the press, and television shattered the pristine world, except for those whose pristine world was learned from the Bible.

(B) The Homeric World

This is the world we learn from the Homeric writings: The sky above is complemented by a sky below, wherefore the world is a SPHERE at whose center there is land. The LAND is CIRCULAR (like a dish); its plane is uneven but is generally FLAT; and it extends all the way down to the world-sphere. The land is surrounded by water, the OCEAN. The distance between the surface of the land and the bottom of the sphere is the same as the distance between the land-surface and the top of the sphere. The Ocean touches the equator of the world-sphere, and the land is slightly above the waters.

(C) The Thaletan Word

By the 6th century B.C., Thales held that the Homeric World was slightly different: The land does not reach all the way down; it is like an island. And, in the Greek world, islands were considered to be floating land, like some tiny Greek islands that do shift positions. Anyway, earthquakes could be better understood, if the land is like a drum in water that can be shaken. (Here we begin to see already the beginning of "natural explanations" instead of just saying that a god shakes the earth or that Neptune shakes the waters of the ocean.

(D) The Anaximandrian Cosmos (ca. 585 B.C.)

The first philosopher and speaker of Physis {Nature} was also concerned with the overall World, the Cosmos.

The major problem with the Homeric and Thaletan World is, What happens to the sun between sunset and sunrise? The pre-philosophical Greeks had envisioned the sun setting far away on the Ocean as taking a boatride from west to east, just as in daytime Helios or Apollo carried thew sun across the sky on a chariot. While starting to break away from theological explanations, Thales envisioned the sun (fiery) becoming extinguished every day and being reborn every day. Anaximander invented a cosmos that lasted until Copernicus (for the few men in history who were educated):

There is a cosmic sphere indeed, with its stars and the wandering stars (the planets -- sun, moon, and 5 others). At its center there is a smaller sphere, we shall call Earth [Gea] which consists of lands and water. There is empty space between the earth and the cosmic sphere. The sun and the other planets circle around the Earth. Etc., etc., etc. This is geocentrism and globalism of the earth. (Practically all educated men in history -- few and far in between -- after Anaximander were gloablists. The Arabs, Spaniards or Italians who produced pictorial [not portolan] any "world-map" (mappa mundi: map of the world), show the 3 continents surrounded by water; presumably the other side of the globe was water: the solid land is on the upper hemisphere, so that lose things stay ON the land and the seas. Practical navigators who made and used portolan geographic maps, were practically flatearthers, as they crossed and measured that flat sea. (In 1474, Toscanelli constructed a geographical map of the global earth, which is the one Columbus used for his voyage around the global earth.) // Aristotle explained the fact that the planets do not fall on the earth by envisioning crystalline (transparent) orbits on which the planets forever roll.

The word "world" or "mundus" is ambigusoulsly used, to our own day, to mean either the cosmic sphere or the global Earth. (Some of the imperial orbs have a band around it to represent the constellations of the zodiac at the equator of the cosmic sphere -- not of the Earth.)

E) The Pythagorean Cosmos (6th century B.C.)

The cosmos is presumed to have a central fire, which would be the sun. This heliocentric theory
was not favored by the ancient philosophers and astronomers, and therefore neither by the Christian scholars before the 15th century. [None understood that globalism is correlated to heliocentrism, as I explained in an above post.] During the Renaissance, the theory was taught at the university of Ferrara, where Copernicus learned it and then developed it.

The Copernican cosmos is precicely like that of Anaximander, except that sun rather than the stationary earth is at the center of the universe.

(F) The Scientific Cosmos

From the 17th century on, we have "scientific cosmology," which comprises the physics of the cosmos and the anatomy or cosmography of the cosmos.

Galileo showed that the matter of the celestial bodies is like the natural one [corruptible, etc.] Newton produced the physics of what then became known as the solar system. Continued studies decentralized the universe; strictly speaking, the cosmos or universe is neither geocentric nor heliocentric. There is no physical cosmic sphere; what used to be called the cosmic sphere is only an optical one. And while Giordano Bruno argued for the time infinity and space infinity of the universe (before his death in 1600), the scientists/astronomers have being giving the picture of the boundless universe, held back in time by the creationist theologians. No scientist has yet proposed a Cosmogenesis -- NOT "how the universe was generated," but how the eternally becoming universe generates, how it does its forming of itself, from the simplest sub-atomic particles to the system of all galaxies while the whole evolution is organismic (not of isolated many atom or many animals). The Renaissance people, after Heraclitus, conceived the UNIVERSE or Macro-cosm as an Organism -- a rationally organized and becoming universe. (Its two vectors are EVOLUTION and TRANSFORMATION, as in the case of the birth and death of individuals, which involve changes at any tier or level of the cosmic hierarchy.)

Antipope Innocent II · 09-12-2007, 08:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amedeo

{Irrelevant stuff snipped}

That's nice Amedeo. You can keep trying to kick up dust all you like, but I'll keep dragging you back to the fact you haven't provided any evidence for Spanish scholars warning Columbus about sailing off the edge of the world or for your so-called "split" in the Middle Ages over whether the Earth was flat or a sphere.

I'll keep rubbing your nose in your stinking ignorance until you give up. And I can keep this up for a looooooong time, I can assure you.

(Why do these people persist in this sort of feeble, irrelevant posting when it's clear to everyone they have been thoroughly beaten? Who do they think they're kidding?)

Amedeo · 09-13-2007, 06:02 AM

Corrected # 320

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amedeo

BRIEF OUTLINE OF HISTORICAL COSMOGRAPHY
-- for any curious general reader, not a reply to the hopeless in "reading comprehension" or pokers of holes in water --

(In order to avoid current confusions, let us momentarily ignore the words "earth" and "universe.")

(A) The Pristine World

In the beginning, a man stood on a mountain (or esperientially build up to this point) and saw LAND around him, with plains and mountains, volcanoes and rivers, and a surrounding SEA. He saw the SKY with its moving sun or, at night, a multitude of stars. [I omit the telling of the actual gnoseological genesis of this comprehensive view of the world.]

The sky was like a dome or a half a sphere -- to use own own language. The earth and the sea were uneven, but they were generally flat, as compared to the sky, like the sea or lakes.

To use our own language, his WORLD was a hemisphere. This is the pristine world, of which he knew innumerable details. But for instance, he did not know how deep the land was. However, since volcanos emitted fire, he INFERRED [by analogy with certain things and situations of his daily life], that it must be quite thick and includes what is not normally evident. Furthermore, there are caves that go deep down: There are underworld habitats. [This pristine world is also taken for granted by non-Greek ancient writings, such as the Bible.]

This Pristine World remained for all intents and purposes the world, for the unlearned people before the 17 century. Thereafter, the divulgation of science, increase in universal schooling, the press, and television shattered the pristine world, except for those whose pristine world was learned from the Bible.

(B) The Homeric World

There is a World we learn from the Homeric writings such as the Iliad: The sky above is complemented by a sky below, wherefore the world is a SPHERE at whose center there is land. The LAND is CIRCULAR (like a dish); its plane is uneven but is generally FLAT; and it extends all the way down to the world-sphere. The land is surrounded by water, the OCEAN. The distance between the surface of the land and the bottom of the sphere is the same as the distance between the land-surface and the top of the sphere. The Ocean touches the equator of the world-sphere, and the land is slightly above the waters.

(C) The Thaletan World

By the 6th century B.C., Thales held that the Homeric World was slightly different: The land does not reach all the way down; if floats on water like a piece of wood. (Earthquakes could be better understood, if the land floats on water. Here we begin to see already the beginning of "natural explanations" instead of just saying that a god shakes the earth or that Neptune shakes the waters of the ocean.) He also exponded an acient view that the earth emerged from water. So water is that out of which things emerge or are born.

(D) The Anaximandrian Cosmos (ca. 585 B.C.)

The first philosopher and speaker of Physis {Nature} was also concerned with the overall World, the Cosmos. [Aristotle gave an account of his predecessors and stated that Thales was the first philosopher. Actually Thales was one of the seven sages of Greece -- wise and learned but not a seeker of wisdom -- and Anaximander started out as one of his pupils.]

The major intellectual problem with the Homeric and Thaletan World is, What happens to the sun between sunset and sunrise? The pre-philosophical Greeks had envisioned the sun setting far away on the Ocean as taking a boatride from west to east, just as in daytime Helios or Apollo carried thew sun across the sky on a chariot. While starting to break away from theological explanations, Thales and others envisioned the sun (fiery) becoming extinguished every day and being reborn every day. Anaximander invented a cosmos that lasted, with secondary modifications until Copernicus (for the few men in history who were educated):

There is a cosmic sphere indeed, with its stars and the wandering stars (the planets -- sun, moon, and 5 others). At its center there is the Earth [Gea], one body which consists of lands AND water. There is empty space between the earth and the cosmic sphere. "The earth is a cylinder in form, and its depth is one-third of its breath." The sun and the other planets circle around the Earth. Etc., etc., etc.

So, Anaximander's Cosmos (Universe) is geocentric and the Earth [land + ocean] is flat at its top surface. Anaximander laid the foundation for the possibility of a non-theological astronomy: the Ocean no longer bathes the shores of Europe, Asia and Africa AND the equator of the cosmic sphere; and the planets move of their own accord [motion-power] around the earth. (Motion is not just the translocation of a thing; in our language, it is the force whereby something moves.)

{{Practically all educated men in history -- few and far in between -- after Anaximander were gloablists: the earth is spherical. Greek philosophers and astronomers propounded or demonstrated that the earth is spherical. The Arabs, Spaniards or Italians who produced pictorial [not portolan] any "world-map" (mappa mundi: map of the world), show the 3 continents surrounded by water; presumably the other side of the globe was water: the solid land is on the upper hemisphere, so that lose things stay ON the land and the seas. Practical navigators who made and used portolan geographic maps, were practically flatearthers, as they crossed and measured that flat sea. But in 1474, Toscanelli constructed a geographical map of the global earth, which is the one Columbus used for his voyage around the global earth. He himself wrote of crossing the Ocean, namely the water that surrounds the 3 continents.// Aristotle explained the fact that the planets do not fall on the earth by envisioning crystalline (transparent) orbits on which the planets forever roll. This theory was made obsolete by Newtonian physics and not before.}}

The word "world" or "mundus" is ambiguously used, to our own day, to mean either the cosmic sphere or the global Earth. (Some of the imperial orbs have a band around it to represent the constellations of the zodiac at the equator of the cosmic sphere -- not of the Earth. An orb was also pictorially places on the left hand of the royal Christ; it represents the universe, not the earth, which was flat for the pre-philosophy Bible people, the Nazarene Jesus included.)

E) The Pythagorean Cosmos (6th century B.C.)

The cosmos is presumed to have a central fire, which would be the sun. This heliocentric theory
was not favored by the ancient philosophers and astronomers, and therefore neither by the Christian scholars before the 15th century. [None understood that globalism is correlated to heliocentrism, as I explained in an above post.] During the Renaissance, the heliocentric theory was taught at the university of Ferrara, where Copernicus learned it and then developed it.

The Copernican cosmos is precisely like that of Anaximander, except that sun rather than the stationary earth is at the center of the universe. And the earth had already become spherical long before Copernicus.

(F) The Scientific Cosmos

From the 17th century on, we have "scientific cosmology," which comprises the physics of the cosmos and the anatomy or cosmography of the cosmos.

Galileo showed that the matter of the celestial bodies is like the natural one [corruptible, etc.] He also discovered the law of the motion of freely falling bodies, of parabolic projectiles, etc. Newton produced the gravitational physics of what then became known as the solar system. Continued studies decentralized the universe; so, strictly speaking, the cosmos or universe is neither geocentric nor heliocentric. There is no physical cosmic sphere; what used to be called the cosmic sphere is only an optical one. Therefore, new geometries of the universe had to be devised. And while Giordano Bruno argued for the time infinity and space infinity of the becoming universe (before his death in 1600), the scientists/astronomers have being giving the picture of the boundless universe, held back in time by the creationist theologians.

As of today, no scientist has yet proposed a Cosmogenesis -- NOT "how the universe was generated," but how the eternally becoming universe generates, how it does its forming of itself ["natura naturans"], from the simplest sub-atomic particles to human organisms well as to the system of all galaxies... while the whole evolution is organismic (not of isolated many atom or many animals). The Renaissance people, after Heraclitus, conceived the UNIVERSE or Macro-cosm as an Organism -- a rationally organized, interwoven, universe. (Its two vectors, time vectors, are the just mentioned EVOLUTION and TRANSFORMATION, as in the case of the birth and death of individuals [etc.], which involve changes at any tier or level of the cosmic hierarchy. The things that evolve do not eliminate the kinds of things which existed before. So, a whole spectrum or hierarchy of things is present all at once before us -- atoms, amoebas, and humans.)

Amedeo · 09-13-2007, 08:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ray Moscow

Quote:

Clivedurdle: Wasn't William technically a Viking? Norman - Norseman?

What Antipope said!

The Normans were "Northmen", but by the point they spoke a dialect of French. It's interesting how we got some words from them and sometimes parallel words from Parisian French, meaning the same thing: ward and guard being the example that comes to mind.

The general idea you expressed is correct. I am going to make just a side remark about the example you used -- which I know is incidental:

The English "guard" come from French, but the French word [< guarder] is parallel to the High German "warten". The point that these English, French, and German words are variants of a Germanic word. A good number of Germanic words [Frankonian, Anglo-Saxon, Longobard, and other] were introduced into the Latin speaking countries from invaders widely around 500 A.D. The English "ward" is an Anglo-Saxon variant of the French/Norman word which was introduced in English in 1066. (It turns out that English has more synonyms than any other language in the world, because of different linguistic sources.) Thus, for example, Italian has words like Guardia, Guida, Guerra, Guado, etc., which came from the language of the Longobards in northern Italy (to the point that War/Guerra replaced the Latin Bellum), and those words are cognates of English words. The cognates in question have to do largely with military and feudal administrative terms, as it is to be expected.

The linguistic influence of French/Norman was minimal in Southern Italy and Sicily (largely occupied before 1066) or is not detectable, since French and the southern Italian dialect are largely Latin-derived languages. (My southern native town, called Longobardi [City of the Longobards], since 700 A.D., is largely Latin derived, with a considerable Greek substrate, and almost imperceptible overlays of Longobard and of French/Norman words; I personally have a Mediterranid [Oscan or Greek] physique with Longobard or Norman colorations -- which more than language attest the presence of Germanic people in Southern Italy.)

[[[Amedeo is synonymous with Philotheos, Gottlieb, etc, but Amendola comes straight from the Greek Amygdale and the famous "almond" lands between Sybaris and Kroton, the homeland of Pythagoras. (The Greek G was pronounced N before a D and some other letters.)]]]

Amedeo · 09-15-2007, 05:13 AM

Emphasis and colors added --

# 64

Quote:

Antipope Innocent II
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Join Date: August 2007
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 122

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Quote:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lucretius View Post
While if course it is all too easy to "Romanticise" (pun very much intended) the Roman Empire I think that those who have studied it do have a more realistic view of it. However an attempt to make the early Middle Ages appear more scientific and a better ,more egalitarian society risks just that ,the "Romanticisation" of a very "dark" period of history.

Of course it may never have been as dark as it was previously painted by mainly 19th century historians but neither was the period one of large scale scientific or social advances.

I'm not sure what "social advances" are (sounds like the old "Whig Fallacy" at work to me) but I don't think anyone is saying there were many "scientific advances" in the Early Middle Ages (ie 500-1000 AD). Just that things weren't as "dark" as the popular conception makes out. Also that this "darkness" can't be laid at the door of the Church, no matter how much some zealots try to distort things to do so.

Quote:

Quote:
That did have to wait to a great extent to the Renaissance

The Twelfth Century Renaissance? Certainly. Or were you referring to the later one with the very pretty pictures and the failed crackpot inventor?
...........

Antipope Innocent II · 09-15-2007, 10:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amedeo

Emphasis and colors added

Er, yup. Still waiting for you to "add" your evidence about this "split" over the shape of the Earth during the Middle Ages and about fears Colombus' ships sailing off the edge of the world. Remind me - why can't you post that evidence again?

Oh yes - because you were totally wrong about those things and your credibility on this board is zero as a result.

And since then you've only proven yourself to be a person no-one can take seriously by posting more laughable garbage about that whole "bloodline of Christ/Knights Templar" crap that only airheads who think The Da Vinci Code was a history textbook take seriously.

I have no idea why you continue to humiliate yourself by posting here at all. Anyone with any intelligence would be hiding and hoping people eventually forget his blunders and errors, not prancing around making even more of them.

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09-12-2007, 08:12 PM	#25
Amedeo Banned Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: US Citizen (edited) Posts: 1,948	BRIEF OUTLINE OF HISTORICAL COSMOGRAPHY -- for any curious general reader, not a reply to the hopeless in "reading comprehension" or punchers of holes in waters -- (In order to avoid current confusions, let us momentarily ignore the words "earth" and "universe.") (A) The Pristine World In the beginning, a man stood on a mountain (or esperientially build up to this point) and saw LAND around him, with plains and mountains, volcanoes and rivers, and a surrounding SEA. He saw the SKY with its moving sun or, at night, a multitude of stars. The sky was like a dome or a half a sphere -- to use own own language. The earth and the sea were uneven, but they were generally flat, as compared to the sky. To use our own language, his WORLD was a hemisphere. This is the pristine world, of which he knew innumerable details. But for instance, he did not know how deep the land was. However, since vulcanos emitted fire, he INFERRED [by analogy with certain things and situations of his daily life], that it must be quite thick and includes what is not normally evident. There are also caves that go deep down: There are underworld habitats. This Pristine world was for all intents and purposed the world, for the unlearned people before the 17 century. Thereafter, the divulgation of science, increase in universal schooling, the press, and television shattered the pristine world, except for those whose pristine world was learned from the Bible. (B) The Homeric World This is the world we learn from the Homeric writings: The sky above is complemented by a sky below, wherefore the world is a SPHERE at whose center there is land. The LAND is CIRCULAR (like a dish); its plane is uneven but is generally FLAT; and it extends all the way down to the world-sphere. The land is surrounded by water, the OCEAN. The distance between the surface of the land and the bottom of the sphere is the same as the distance between the land-surface and the top of the sphere. The Ocean touches the equator of the world-sphere, and the land is slightly above the waters. (C) The Thaletan Word By the 6th century B.C., Thales held that the Homeric World was slightly different: The land does not reach all the way down; it is like an island. And, in the Greek world, islands were considered to be floating land, like some tiny Greek islands that do shift positions. Anyway, earthquakes could be better understood, if the land is like a drum in water that can be shaken. (Here we begin to see already the beginning of "natural explanations" instead of just saying that a god shakes the earth or that Neptune shakes the waters of the ocean. (D) The Anaximandrian Cosmos (ca. 585 B.C.) The first philosopher and speaker of Physis {Nature} was also concerned with the overall World, the Cosmos. The major problem with the Homeric and Thaletan World is, What happens to the sun between sunset and sunrise? The pre-philosophical Greeks had envisioned the sun setting far away on the Ocean as taking a boatride from west to east, just as in daytime Helios or Apollo carried thew sun across the sky on a chariot. While starting to break away from theological explanations, Thales envisioned the sun (fiery) becoming extinguished every day and being reborn every day. Anaximander invented a cosmos that lasted until Copernicus (for the few men in history who were educated): There is a cosmic sphere indeed, with its stars and the wandering stars (the planets -- sun, moon, and 5 others). At its center there is a smaller sphere, we shall call Earth [Gea] which consists of lands and water. There is empty space between the earth and the cosmic sphere. The sun and the other planets circle around the Earth. Etc., etc., etc. This is geocentrism and globalism of the earth. (Practically all educated men in history -- few and far in between -- after Anaximander were gloablists. The Arabs, Spaniards or Italians who produced pictorial [not portolan] any "world-map" (mappa mundi: map of the world), show the 3 continents surrounded by water; presumably the other side of the globe was water: the solid land is on the upper hemisphere, so that lose things stay ON the land and the seas. Practical navigators who made and used portolan geographic maps, were practically flatearthers, as they crossed and measured that flat sea. (In 1474, Toscanelli constructed a geographical map of the global earth, which is the one Columbus used for his voyage around the global earth.) // Aristotle explained the fact that the planets do not fall on the earth by envisioning crystalline (transparent) orbits on which the planets forever roll. The word "world" or "mundus" is ambigusoulsly used, to our own day, to mean either the cosmic sphere or the global Earth. (Some of the imperial orbs have a band around it to represent the constellations of the zodiac at the equator of the cosmic sphere -- not of the Earth.) E) The Pythagorean Cosmos (6th century B.C.) The cosmos is presumed to have a central fire, which would be the sun. This heliocentric theory was not favored by the ancient philosophers and astronomers, and therefore neither by the Christian scholars before the 15th century. [None understood that globalism is correlated to heliocentrism, as I explained in an above post.] During the Renaissance, the theory was taught at the university of Ferrara, where Copernicus learned it and then developed it. The Copernican cosmos is precicely like that of Anaximander, except that sun rather than the stationary earth is at the center of the universe. (F) The Scientific Cosmos From the 17th century on, we have "scientific cosmology," which comprises the physics of the cosmos and the anatomy or cosmography of the cosmos. Galileo showed that the matter of the celestial bodies is like the natural one [corruptible, etc.] Newton produced the physics of what then became known as the solar system. Continued studies decentralized the universe; strictly speaking, the cosmos or universe is neither geocentric nor heliocentric. There is no physical cosmic sphere; what used to be called the cosmic sphere is only an optical one. And while Giordano Bruno argued for the time infinity and space infinity of the universe (before his death in 1600), the scientists/astronomers have being giving the picture of the boundless universe, held back in time by the creationist theologians. No scientist has yet proposed a Cosmogenesis -- NOT "how the universe was generated," but how the eternally becoming universe generates, how it does its forming of itself, from the simplest sub-atomic particles to the system of all galaxies while the whole evolution is organismic (not of isolated many atom or many animals). The Renaissance people, after Heraclitus, conceived the UNIVERSE or Macro-cosm as an Organism -- a rationally organized and becoming universe. (Its two vectors are EVOLUTION and TRANSFORMATION, as in the case of the birth and death of individuals, which involve changes at any tier or level of the cosmic hierarchy.)

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