There is No "Up" and "Down"

This flat conceptioning is manifest right up to the present in such every¬ day expressions as "the wide, wide world" and "the four comers of the Earth." As mentioned before, "up" and "down" are the parallel perpendicu¬ lars impinging upon this flat-out world. Only a flat-out world could have a Heaven to which to ascend and a Hell into which to descend. Both Christ and Mohammed, their followers said, ascended into Heaven from Jerusalem. Scientifically speaking (which is truthfully speaking...

 Science Threatened Monarchical Power

Following the death of Christ and the preaching by his disciples, the promised prospect of salvation for all believers raised the Christian priest¬ hood to unprecedentedly powerful popularity. The combined religious and martial emperorship found its authoritarianly formulated credo (meaning "I believe") threatened by the B.C. Greek scientists' ever-unorthodox thinking and discovering. "Science," as Sir James Jeans said two millennia later, "is the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of...