The devil doesn’t run nature. God does it. And we have learned that when a theory is “ugly”, it’s probably wrong. One time after another, when we get to the bottom of a phenomenon, the theory that best describes it is elegant (in the sense of functional simplicity) and yes, beautiful.
Would you expect any less of God?
He exists, but he’s a wretched being who can only attempt to twist and distort what God creates. And he is not able to change the rules by which nature works.
Thank you Barbarian, this post (and the post that prompted your reply) is one of the most interesting of all I have read. At last someone else mentions the real culprit among us, the Devil himself. Given Jesus called him the ‘Father of Lies’, and the 1st person of the Trinity ‘Father’, there are NO LIMITS to his ability to deceive.
But I bet you put limits on this ability StA. No. it is a certainty, and I will prove it. I say that the Devil deceived the combined intelligence of mankind into accepting the sun is fixed in a solar system and that the earth orbits it.
Now elsewhere I have said that this world-view was once a religion of the Devil. Here is a history of that religion for any who doubt:
The Mysteries
The Mysteries were religious institutions that arose throughout the populated world arising from the post-flood confusion and may be regarded as the church of the ancient pagan gentile nations. In them all there is found a peculiar though common conception of the divine nature as a type of pantheism that constitutes their common bond of unity. These institutions, not exactly uniform in their various rites, were widely distributed and flourished in Egypt, Chaldea, India, China, Japan, Canaan, Africa, Greece, Rome, Mexico, and in the isles of the sea. Their mode of religious instruction was esoteric. This was not taught in a dogmatic way but by rite and symbol of religious conception communicated to the initiated only. The mysteries were known and transmitted by priests. The sages and philosophers taught in these institutions what they hardly dared to teach in public, and the disciples were bound to secrecy concerning the things heard and learned. It was contended by some of the priests that if the secrets therein taught were divulged, the universe would fall.
Prominent in the mysteries was sun worshipping with its sexual connotations. In the Bible we are told of Baal, the sun god of the Phoenicians (3 Kings 16:31-33), characterised by the most scandalously impure rites (3 Kings 14:24). Second only to him are the sun gods of the Canaanites and Mithraists of Persia. It is sufficient for this thesis however, to focus on one particular source of sun worshipping; that founded on the myth of Osiris and Isis in ancient Egypt. This myth was viewed as a picture of the daily life of the sun combating darkness but succumbing to it only to appear again in renewed splendour as the young Horus, his son. It was also seen as a picture of human life, its perpetual conflict and final seeming destruction, to be restored in the new youth of brighter existence. Isis is the same as Demeter, earth mother or nature and Osiris is the sun, the fertilizer of earth, and generator of earthly life.
Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler and Isaac Newton were all into hermetism.
Newton the Alchemist
Westfall shows that ‘Sir Isaac Newton hated and feared Popery.’ Koestler shows that he was: ‘A crank theologian…who held that the tenth horn of the fourth beast of the Apocalypse represented the Roman Catholic Church.’ Newton’s exhaustive studies of the ancient religions led him to believe the old Vestal Cult as the original true religion. This cult adored the god of nature (the god of forces) and had a temple designed to imitate a heliocentric solar system, within which was a burning fire with seven lamps orbiting it. Thus Newton’s belief in the hermetic legend of the City of the Sun re-enacted by the Freemasons, as befitted their origins in the ancient occult Mysteries.
Quote:
‘Newton had a profound belief in prisca sapientia, an original wisdom given to the Ancients. He thought that in the earliest times God had imparted the secrets of natural philosophy and true religion to a select few. The knowledge was subsequently lost but traces could be still found hidden in myths where it would remain unnoticed by the vulgar. Many mysteries had been deliberately disguised to guard them from minds not fit to receive them. Newton turned to the most esoteric of Alchemical books where he believed the real secrets to be hidden.’ —
William Rankin: Newton and Classical Physics, Icon Books, UK, 2000, p.107.