The Sinkhole of the Cosmos

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A very good article making at length a point I've made several times here: the Copernican Revolution did not displace man from some exalted spot at the center of the universe. Nope, before Copernicus, Christian Europeans understood themselves to be living in:

"the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world... the worst, the deadest, and the most stagnant part of the universe, on the lowest story of the house, and the farthest from the vault of heaven."

To join the planets and stars as a celestial body was a huge upgrade for man's dwelling place.

And a corollary: anyone who you hear saying that Copernicus "displaced man from his exalted place at the center" is a charlatan: they are willing, for ideological purposes, to simply make things up without having any idea what they are talking about.

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