Thousands of years before there were any organized cultural or
sociological rules and laws, humans had made observations about nature that seemed
rational and were commonly accepted as realistic for people to believe that the
world was essentially flat. This assumption became woven into the fabric of
their lives in such a way that any suggestion to the contrary would elicit
immediate rebuke. This seemingly natural assumption was ingrained into cultural
legends which included the presumed hazards that awaited anyone who ventured
too near the edge of their world. Early sailors never sailed far from shore,
always keeping within sight of land. Stories of ships and sailors lost at sea
continued to fuel the flat earth theory and were assumed to have fallen into
oblivion by sailing too close to the edge of the world.
For thousands of years, mankind believed the earth was flat
until the Greeks began to master sailing across the Aegean and Mediterranean
seas, when the notion of a round earth began to emerge. Pythagoras (6th century
BCE) has been credited as the first to suggest the earth was ball like in
structure. This was only a theory accepted by limited consensus for several
centuries. It was not until Ferdinand Magellan's (1519-1522) circumnavigating
the planet that Western European cultures finally began to accept the theory as
a probable fact.
The primary resistance to this new theory of a spherical
world was led by cultures and religious societies which were either based on,
or influenced by the superstitions, myths and legends of ancient religious texts.
Another primitive theory that was very closely tied to the
flat earth assumption, was the consideration that this world was the center of
the universe. This too, was a very natural assumption based on early observations
of the motion of heavenly bodies, i.e., sun, moon, stars, etc. The first notion
purposed to conflict with these early assumptions was made in the 3rd century
BCE, by Aristarchus of Samos, who suggested that the Sun was the center of the
universe. It was many centuries later before this notion was to become
supported by credible scholars. Nicolaus
Copernicus formulated his theory of a spherical orb in his thesis, On the
Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, in the early 1500s, which was widely
circulated throughout astronomical circles and began to gain wide recognition
as a credible theory and began to detail the position of not only a center of
the universe, but positions of known planets.
As improvements to scientific instruments became available,
other pioneers such as Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) contributed further support
to the Copernicus theory. In so doing, he incurred the wrath of the Roman
Catholic Inquisition who placed him under house arrest for the last nine years
of his life for suspicion of being a heretic of scripture. All publications of
Copernicus, Galileo and others referring to the Sun as the center of the known
universe were banned. It was not until 1992, 350 years after the condemnation
of Galileo, that the Roman Catholic church officially acknowledged that Galileo
was correct, and that the planet earth does indeed orbit around the sun.
Today, our scientific knowledge has taken precedent over a
previous belief of the Sun as center of the universe and has determined that
there is a center of the Milky Way Galaxy, of which our Solar system is only a
small part. Further, as there exists billions of Galaxies throughout space,
there is no known center of the universe.
Another phenomena that has existed for millions of years and
has been considered an omen of various sorts, is the rainbow. For the most
part, it has/is generally considered a good rather than bad omen. Rainbows
occur in many ancient myths and legends as signs of good fortune or hope, as in
the Biblical story of Noah, the Celtic legend of a location of a pot of gold,
or the Greco-Roman mythology that rainbows are paths for messengers to travel
between heaven and earth.
Although many early scientists have attempted to explain
rainbows, it fell to Sir Isaac Newton and his studies of optics to finally
provide an accurate account of the prismatic rainbow effect. As a mathematician/scientist
his contributions to the wealth of scientific knowledge of the day was immeasurable
and has laid the foundation for much of what we know today concerning
mathematics, optics, gravity, etc.
These are but a few of the many myths, legends and mysteries
which have been explained by a developing knowledge bank of scientific information
about our universe. There still remains a segment of our population which will
never understand nor accept the reality of these phenomena. They continue to
embrace literal dogmas of fundamental religious explanations of the universe based
on ancient texts that were written before cultures had any means of scientific
discovery or theorems. The Six Day Creation believers, the Young Earth
Theorists, and a Spirit world of eternal reward or punishment before and/or
after a physical life on this planet, are only a few of the more familiar
groups. These societies are reluctant to accept scientific explanations of
events and phenomena, because they conflict with the myths or their ancient
texts and perceive any intrusion of modern science threatens their fundamental
concepts. Like the Flat Earth theorists of long ago, they will cling to archaic
beliefs until they become extinct.
The beliefs and concepts of religious societies are
numerous. There is no limit to a combination of superstitions, myths, legends
or ideas that can be assembled to support almost any belief system imaginable.
Ten thousand years ago, the choices were limited to the natural events that
challenged or threatened our ancestors. Today, these choices have been
multiplied by an immeasurable factor to the point where almost anything can be
conjured up to become a belief system to fit any situation, whether or not
there are provable facts to support it. The variety of these concepts and the
charlatans who use them are innumerable as there are cultures:
The Branch Davidians, founded by David Koresh, 1959
Heaven’s Gate, founded by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie
Nettles, early 1970s
The People’s Temple Commune, founded by Jim Jones, 1950s
Scientology, founded by L. Ron Hubbard, 1952
The Unification Church, founded by Reverend Sun Myung Moon,
1954
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints, founded by Warren Jeffs, late 1990s
The Twelve Tribes, founded by Elbert Eugene Spriggs, 1971
But to name only a few.
It is true, as Leo Tolstoy suggests, there are as many minds
as there are heads and each mind perceives life through its own unique vision.
A common consensus of truth comes only through discovery and arduous testing.
The “truths” of thousands of years ago are not intended to be the “truths” of
today. Human minds were created to gather knowledge not only of the current
universe, but to generate an ever clearer picture of the history of our past
and the direction of our future. To remain shackled to archaic concepts and
superstitions is to deny the purpose of our existence.
Keith Crowe
2 / 2015
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