Not me as can be guessed

I'm on the fence, but I'm more prone to cheering the geocentrists on, because the heliocentrists are so annoyingly smug!

Clare.

I'm on the fence, but I'm more prone to cheering the geocentrists on, because the heliocentrists are so annoyingly smug!

Clare.

 :rahrah:

Science as a spectator sport and picking favourites by the colour of the uniforms uh ?

This is one issue that I've grown to let go.  A geocentric individuals strikes me as pretty harmless.

But the Sun of Justice is going to return to that earth to oversee its being dissolved in flames and its elements reconstituted.

Nazareth will one day be no more. That's kind of sad. Rome will one day be no more. That's a very happy thought.

As for myself it is very simple. I have no problem at all knowing that the Sun would revolve around the Earth which contains the spot where the Word became Flesh and dwelt amongst us.

The harm of heliocentrism wasn't that it couldn't immediately be proved, but could be in so many ways, ultimately, but that it was used as yet another early wedge against the Faith.

The notion of geological eons followed quickly by Darwinism, was yet another assault.

But it's because many opposed to the Faith of Roman Catholicism, and a lesser number against various Protestantism, that they made logical arguments, or arguments of false logic, based on these things against The Church.

Someone correct me if this is wrong, but it's said that Bellarmine insisted that the earth not only was our point of reference, our 'inertial frame' as it later would be seen, but that the heavens rotated as spheres, and spheres around spheres, etc. around the earth. And that could be disproved. It's not a question of relative motion.

But that the earth remains the center of our universe is without question. That this is the origin of a 'space-time' cone, if you will, is just how it is. From this vantage point, time and space proceed from earth, or at least from the same general area. The heavens may not circle in perfect orbits around earth, or this solar system. But as a point of reference, this IS the point of reference, right where we are now.

There's also something about this place, this planet, that is either missed intentionally or not by certain researchers. This is where life is known. This is where God intervened in the affairs of those made in His Image. This is where the 'action is', in a universe of unimaginably vast nebulae and gigantic or massive stars. It could be that out of all of that, all the factors that had to come into play, did so right here, by God's design. It could be, there's nothing else out there except for digitally colored and enhanced wonders that existed, in many cases, before Adam was even created. And those spectacles are, in a sense, long gone. And we aren't.

Nazareth will one day be no more. That's kind of sad. Rome will one day be no more. That's a very happy thought.

Aren't Catholics supposed to have a filial love for Rome, the center of Catholicism?

I'll admit, it's hard to keep that love alive nowadays -- but we need to distinguish between our "Romanitas" and our sticking up for the Faith of all times which puts us in opposition to this or that cardinal who isn't fighting for the Faith.

Matthew

I see that we are mixing not only doctrine but piety with science. I am just going to take it for granted that, say, Carl Sagan's views on the set-up  of our universe are the god's truth, and proceed piously, if rather idiosyncratically, from there.

But first, about loving Rome. For obvious reasons, those who do not accept the post-Vatican II popes as spiritual leaders will have a feeling about Rome different from that of those who believe that the Vicar of Christ still resides there in all his Christ-given glory.

But even as regards the Roman stint of Christ's True Church as agreed upon by all Catholics, I don't think that it could be demonstrated that Catholics are obliged to have any kind of love for the city of Rome. Not in light of what it represents ultimately. "Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of Antichrist etc...."

Nazareth represents Jesus, Mary, and Joseph per se.

Rome represents the Emperor Nero as well as the Apostle Peter and a lot of gray stuff in between.

If we are going to be Apocalyptic at all we must be Apocalyptically correct. Like Melanie of LaSalette, St John the Divine has nothing good to say about the mystic Babylon, which is taken to be Rome. But Rome took a dim view of THOSE prophesies of Mademoiselle Melanie.

"O Roma felix..."

I would agree that some Catholics are better off not knowing about those condemned prophesies of Melanie or anything that could make the thought of Rome seem less happy. But it is certain that all mankind is better off knowing nothing about Vatican II and the New Pentecost. How do we avoid knowing anything about the horrors of THAT Roman circus?

So it's quite a tangled web. I know that the thought of Rome's one day being no more is a great comfort to me.

To get back to the theme of the thread, I was responding to the pious consideration in which scientific geocentrism somehow got a plug. My goal is to provide pious considerations for those who take the opposite point of view. So I was thinking of the Earth not as the place where the Word was made Flesh, but as the place where He was betrayed and killed by the leaders of His Church and nailed to two planks alongside two others, as St Luke puts it in a way that so many have found oddly disturbing. Two OTHERS (criminals)...

So what if there is more to the physical universe than was previously known? It's a mad, mad, mad, mad moral universe. We should put all our trust in the Soul of Our Savior as far as having any kind of feeling of security in such a creation goes. Modern science introduces some dizzying and soul-shrivelling prospects- it's all child's play compared to what we read in the Apocalypse. To what we read when we open up the newspaper. Especially the Catholic one.

I'm all for honoring anything associated with the Incarnation, but even so, this world is a matter of Vanity of Vanities. The world is going to be destroyed in fire, center of everything or not. The human race is going to be exterminated, and the planet it befouls will be blown to atoms.  God is going to point His finger at one generation of the children of Adam and say, "We have had enough of your kind. We will have no more."

In some sense there will be a Jerusalem, in no sense will there be a Rome. Yet "Eternal" Rome left the earthly Jerusalem with not one stone standing upon another. There must be a lesson in that for all of us.