Blithering On

So, I guess I just haven't been keeping up. I saw a movie the other evening for the first time in my life. I hadn't even heard of it, but I was sort of eavesdropping on the Turner Classic Movies station as the host - I think it was Robert Osborne - introduced the next feature saying that it was his favorite movie of all time. That got my interest up, so I paid some attention. The movie was A Place in the Sun and I checked the description of the movie to see if it had a chance of being interesting to me, and it did. I don’t want to ruin the movie for you, but the thing’s been out since 1951 so it’s not like you haven’t had a chance to see it already… Anyway, Montgomery Clift plays George Eastman who is an uneducated directionless young guy who hitchhikes to his Uncle Charles’ place. Uncle Charles owns a swim suit factory (that turns out to be ironic) and puts George to work. The company has a “don’t date the other employees” policy, but George ends up secretly making tim...

Only 400 years ago, Galileo turned the religious and scientific worlds on their heads when he publicly asserted the heliocentric theory—the idea that the Sun was at the center of the universe—as a scientific certainty. Up to that point, the generally accepted view was that the Earth was at the center of the universe. The Church held that God would not have positioned His most important creation anywhere other than at the center of everything else He created. The Church’s frame of reference included a group of Biblical passages that seemed to lend weight to geocentrism. Joshua 10:12 recounts Joshua commanding the Sun to stand still (thus reinforcing the belief that the Sun moved). Then there are Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30—“…the world is firmly established; it cannot be moved”; Psalm 104:5—“…the Lord set the Earth on its foundations; it can never be moved”; and Ecclesiastes 1:5—“…the Sun rises and the Sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.” Until Galileo—and c...