Tag: church

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Circles within Circles — The universe versus the heavens

Circles within Circles

The universe versus the heavens

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 20th 2025 Happy Equinox!

I just finished watching an anime series on Netflix called Orb. It’s 25 episodes, and is based on a highly fictionalized 14th and 15th century Europe, where a church, identified as “C” is fighting to preserve the biblical belief that Earth is the center of creation, and is the bedrock, immobile, and all other heavenly bodies rotate around it. A disparate group of sky watchers, some clergy and some not, dispute this view, arguing that the Earth actually goes around the sun. The church reacts with a vicious inquisition and with death by burning mandated for heliocentric heretics. It is basically a fictionalized account of the general tone of the 14th through 17th centuries.

I was going to do a review of the series upon its completion, but the fact of the matter is it isn’t very good. The characters are wooden and two dimensional, and while it shows charts showing the patent absurdity of the church’s beloved geocentric model, it doesn’t really explain why the far simpler and logical heliocentric model didn’t prevail. After all, it already did in such places as Japan, China, India, and the Middle East. (It was also known in parts of the Americas, but Europe didn’t know about the Americas at that point.) One of the rationales for the Crusades was that the ‘heathen Muslims’ believed the sun was the center of the universe.

It had its moments of absurdity, as in when one cleric found his faith in geocentrism shattered by finally observing Venus “in full phase.” Since Venus and Earth are on the same orbital plane, the only time Venus would be in full phase in relation to the Earth is when it is directly behind the sun from us. And finally, the ending of the series was nonsensical, abrupt, and confusing. Bit of a shame, really—it did start out promising, and at least some of the people involved did the homework. The casual background images of the sky, especially at night are amazing, accurate, and in a few sequences when the POV is over several minutes with stationary objects to the side, you can actually see rotational movement of the stars as they are occluded by the foreground object. That was impressive. As noted, someone put some real work into this.

I had recently encountered stats showing that a full 26% of American adults—over a quarter of the voting population—believe the sun goes around the Earth. A smaller but still statistically significant portion of the population believe the Earth is flat. I can’t even blame religion for this: America has a deep anti-intellectual, anti-science and unimaginative streak, one exemplified by the present administration. This is encouraged by industries that find scientific analysis of their products and emissions to be inconvenient and even expensive. Easier to dismiss science than it is to argue against it. I encounter victims of this on line, and sometimes I’ll actually engage with them. (As soon as religion or conspiracy theories show up, I just block them as a waste of carbon.) I like to challenge them to work out the math for a flight, using the Hohmann transfer trajectory, to get to Mars and back. I can do one good enough for nevermind, and I’ll bet there’s an app for my phone that could do it up to NASA or ESA requirements, too.

One of the more impressive elements of the series was the display of the movements of the planets. Astronomers of the era bent over backwards to display the elements of apparent planetary motion. The results usually look like they were done on a Spirograph. This is because the five inner planets as seen from Earth move backwards at regular intervals for varying amounts of time. It’s called retrograde motion, and it’s easily explained by the heliocentric model.

Think of it as a circular race course, with each planet in its own lane—Mercury on the innermost, Saturn on the outermost. Earth is in the center one. Mercury goes around every 88 days, Venus every 225 days, Earth every 365 days, Mars every 687 days, Jupiter every 4,333 days, and Saturn every 10,756 days. It makes for a very boring race, I agree.

In the middle track, Earth races ahead of the slower outer planets, passing them and making them appear to move backward compared to the fixed objects in the background—in this case, the stars. The two inner planets appear to move backward against the stars because when their orbits on are on the far side of the sun, they are. If we’re at 3 o’clock moving toward 2 o’clock (sorry but they move counterclockwise seen from above) then the two might be moving from 11 o’clock to 7 o’clock.

Heliocentrism explains that phenomenon without having to have a body stop dead in its tracks and then loop back on itself with grand disregard for inertia or common sense. Unfortunately, the religious fundamentalist mind tends to embrace the more convoluted and irrational explanation as evidence that God’s powers exist and are above the silly laws of the world.

Nonetheless, heliocentrism prevailed. Without math and scientific theory to support it, it was a competing opinion. But with math, it all adds up.

Let’s take a look at how that happened.

Per Wikipedia: “The first non-geocentric model of the universe was proposed by the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus (d. 390 BC), who taught that at the center of the universe was a ‘central fire’, around which the Earth, Sun, Moon and planets revolved in uniform circular motion. This system postulated the existence of a counter-earth collinear with the Earth .”

The heliocentric model, while much simpler than any Earth-centric model, lacked anything beyond Occam’s Razor to justify it. Without math to describe it, it was just another opinion. Copernicus started that route, stating that the orbits were circular, with a motionless sun at the center, and unvarying. All three statements were incorrect, and had no more empirical justification than any other theory, but it was a step in the right direction.

Kepler, between 1609 and 1619, devised his three laws that clarified the behavior of the solar system.

Kepler’s three laws state that:

  1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
  2. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
  3. The square of a planet’s orbital period is proportional to the cube of the length of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

It wasn’t until Newton released his Principia in 1687 that he deduced the ratios of gravitational attraction.

He determined that the force of that attraction (F) was equivalent to the mass of the first object times the mass of the second object, divided by the distance between the centers of the two masses, squared.

Newton was flummoxed by his own discovery, writing “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.”

Absurd or not, it was the death knell of theological objections to the heliocentric theory of the solar system.

The final nail in the coffin came over a century later, when Henry Cavendish devised the universal gravitational constant, which described the strength of the gravitational attraction (6.674 × 10−11m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2) which showed exactly why the planets moved the way they do.

With that, the last piece fell into place and heliocentrism was established theory, on par with evolution, gravity, and atomic theory. We have landed craft on Mars and Venus, and approached all the other planets, using the advances listed above to do so. You fling a craft at Mars, and you aim it while it’s still within a few thousand miles of Earth and it COASTS to its target, some 130 million miles away. Moving target. That’s one hell of a game of darts!

With fascists and religious fanatics clawing down every scientific and philosophical advance since the 14th century, it’s important that you stand for science and knowledge. But you need to know WHY you are standing for it, and have the tools you need to defend it, and the knowledge to explain it. You aren’t like those morons who take it on faith because god loves irrationality, or it’s a commie plot.

A lot of science is well beyond the ken of any normal person. Quantum physics, with indeterminacy, eigenstates and probability collapses, is confounding, especially since we live in an artificially stable world above a foundation of chaos and random chance. We don’t really know if the universe is expanding, contracting, or not doing anything at all. Or if it has edges. The cosmological constant provides us with the unsettling news that the density of the universe just happens, by chance, to exactly match the amount of dark energy (which seems to be decreasing) and without the match, we wouldn’t exist at all.

Fortunately, you don’t have to take any of that on faith. It reflects nothing but the current state of our knowledge, and we really are still seven blind men trying to describe an elephant. Upheavals in our apprehension of the universe are frequent. The wonder and strangeness of the universe will always far exceed our imaginations.

But in our quotidian lives, some things are infallible and constant. Among them: the Earth is an orb, and revolves around the Sun. The Sun revolves around the Milky Way core. In fact, it’s safe to say that in our universe, everything revolves around something else. With one possible but as yet unknown exception.

Don’t hesitate to slap down the flat Earthers. But do take the effort to understand WHY you are right and they are wrong. You owe that, not just to them, but to yourself.

 

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Gorsuch Nonesuch – He’s our bear to cross

March 30th, 2019

Alleged Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil “Son of Anne” Gorsuch is one of four members of the court who are pretty much indistinguishable from one another. The other three are Clarence “Slappy” Thomas, Samuel “Little Scalia” Alito, and Brett “Hold My Beer” Kavanaugh. They are all members of the Federalist Society, breeding ground for right-wing lice and essentially just the John Birch Society with a makeover and more money. All four are corporatists, authoritarians, and, typically of authoritarians, profess strong religious beliefs.

Of course, authoritarians always stand foursquare for religious supremacy, since there’s nothing like religion to compel obedience from the masses. The entire GOP is hag-ridden with toy despots who love to chant “God is with us” (“Got Mitt Uns”) and disparage the rest of America as socialist atheist Moslem Jews.

Like most of his ilk, Gorsuch regards ‘separation of church and state’ to be a doctrinal error forced upon Americans by a liberal elite.

In the infamous Hobby Lobby case, which ruled employers were free to cheat their employees out of birth control, even when offered at no cost to the employer, Gorsuch said it, “was not, is not, the place of courts of law to question the correctness or the consistency of tenets of religious faith, only to protect the exercise of faith.” It stands as a really excellent reason why employers should have no say in employee health care—at all. Who wants to have their life ruined by a treatable condition just because the boss is a religious nut? That’s basically what the ruling permits.

Gorsuch once wrote in a decision, “[A]ll human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.” Note the use of the word ‘private’. The state must always be allowed to kill at will. It’s the Dominionist theology in a nutshell; it’s not piety that drives them; it’s authoritarianism.

Only Gorsuch knows if he subscribes to Dominionist philosophy or not. Dominionists believe that the United States is subservient to the will of god, and that Holy Writ supercedes secular law. Gorsuch has made it clear he believes in freedom of religion, in that religion is free to avail itself of public assets and impose its will on others, and he is absolutely silent on the doctrine of freedom from religion, the right not to be subject to church doctrine and church costs.

There’s a pair of cases pending before the court right now,  American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association. 

The subject of the case is the Peace Cross, a forty-foot tall granite cross that sits on a small patch of land in Bladensburg, Maryland at the crux (no pun intended—OK, I lied, it was intentional) of a three way major intersection in the town. The cross was erected between 1919 and 1925 (six years to do what the Romans could do in six minutes) on what then was private land. While the monument was purportedly to honor the 49 residents of Bladensburg who died in the Great War, the purpose was unabashedly religious. Donors were required to sign a card before even being allowed to donate that read, “WE, THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND, TRUSTING IN GOD, THE SUPREME RULER OF THE UNIVERSE, PLEDGE FAITH IN OUR BROTHERS WHO GAVE THEIR ALL IN THE WORLD WAR TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY. THEIR MORTAL BODIES HAVE TURNED TO DUST, BUT THEIR SPIRIT LIVES TO GUIDE US THROUGH LIFE IN THE WAY OF GODLINESS, JUSTICE, AND LIBERTY. WITH OUR MOTTO, ‘ONE GOD, ONE COUNTRY AND ONE FLAG,’ WE CONTRIBUTE TO THIS MEMORIAL CROSS COMMEMORATING THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO HAVE NOT DIED IN VAIN.” Yes, all upper case. Religionists do like to shout.

There must not have been enough religious louts floating around at the time because in 1922 the project ran out of both money and Christians, and the American Legion took it over. The Legionnaires had a lot of fun with their new toy, holding many religious services (all Christian, of course) and patriotic hootenannies on the Fourth of July and Memorial Day and the like.

But along about 1961, the city elders looked at that big old top heavy stone cross that sat in the middle of a heavily-trafficked intersection with vehicles running around the cross in a tight circle. Possibly, they reflected that it was erected on behalf of a deity with a long and colorful history of arbitrarily smiting people, and it being an era when government actually looked out for the welfare of the citizenry, decided it might be wise to prevent a sudden gust of wind from dispatching some of the town’s good Christian folk to whatever reward they had coming. So they bought the land from the Legionnaires (records don’t indicate the Legion was particularly upset about this) and started doing maintenance. The new owners, the Appellee Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, are a state agency and they have spent a cool $217,000 in tax dollars on that cross since 1961.

Right wingers like to howl that the suits exist only because the plaintiffs were “offended” and unfortunately, that idiotic argument does appear in the court filings. But in reality, and the reason it’s in front of the Supreme Court Biblebangers is because this unabashedly Christian icon is being maintained on the public dime.

Gorsuch has argued that nobody can sue on behalf of separation of church and state unless they have Standing—some sort of direct involvement in which they can show demonstrable loss or impairment of their rights.

Something R. Muse at Daily Kos wrote, “Gorsuch did, in fact, claim that any plaintiffs who challenge government establishment and endorsement of one specific religion should be banned from suing the government to force it to uphold the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. According to Gorsuch, there is no situation that allows any American to have ‘legal standing to challenge’ a Christian religious display on government property; something that is in fact establishing religion. He claims that because ‘their only injury is that they take offense’ at the religious display on taxpayer’s land, in his theocratic mind being offended is not enough to demand the government abide by the law of the land – any more than expecting Christian conservative justices to support, uphold, and decide cases based on the Constitution.”

It seems likely that Gorsuch, along with the other Court godpounders, will ignore the fact that the public is being forced to maintain a Christian icon, but instead focus on whether the offended have any rights. I kinda hope he does. If he rules that religious folk have a right to offend, then I might take up a fundraiser to buy a piece of property facing a prominent church and erect an 80-foot tall bronze statue of a naked Satan, complete with bifulcerated penis with little snake heads on each tip. It would be great for tourism. If the court rules that churches can use public lands to offend, then I’ll start a crowdfund for a 600 foot wide plush Flying Spaghetti Monster to drape over Half Dome in Yosemite, that as hikers walk pasta, they may gaze on His Noodley Appendages and marvel at the wisdom of humanity.

Of course, there is a simple and elegant solution that could have prevented this case in the first place. Just have the Commission sell the land to a private buyer—a consortium of the local churches, a fast food chain, whatever. They assume all costs and responsibilities (including potential flattening of passers-by) and they can have all their little services and whatnot on their own dime.

You see, most people aren’t offended by displays that are religious in nature. If you put up a Nativity in your front yard, I might, at worst, shrug and ignore you. If I think you’re just trying to wind me up, I might respond with a tasteful tableau from a favorite movie, say by Tarantino or Cronenberg or maybe even Larry Flint. I got a holy right to offend too, you know.

But as noted, it’s unlikely this Court will rule from piety. They simply want to assert power, and the best way to do that is by asserting a right to control the rest of us. And there’s nothing like religion to compel obedience from the masses.

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