Tuesday 20 October 2009

Religion for Godsake?

Gonna talk a little about something close to my heart …

If a person truly believed rain fell upwards we would think them mad. If a group of people believed, against all the evidence to the contrary, that the sky was green, we would rightly consider them at best slightly weird. It’s hopefully unlikely these groups of people actually exist outside our more padded institutions.

However, there was a time when people believed the solar system rotated around the Earth. To suggest this to be wrong was dangerous and you risked being the main course of a barbecue. Now, of course, we have all the evidence we need to prove the solar system is heliocentric; the planets revolve around the Sun. These days, nobody is flambĂ©ed for suggesting the Sun is the centre of the solar system – unless we really don’t like them, but that’s less to do with their astronomical views.