Rob Seaman said:
> Our modern sensibility may lead us to discount Egyptian and Druidic (or
> earlier) world views, but surely the many cultures worldwide that
> produced pyramids and other monolithic structures do demonstrate the
> frequent centrality of spirituality in human decision making. Those
> cultures most definitely knew the motions of the Sun, Moon, stars and
> planets intimately. Steve Allen already provided a convincing real
> world example of the response of a more recent mainstream religious
> community to civil calendar issues.
This would be the point about sunrise on saints' days?
All these issues have one thing in common - they pre-date the introduction
of atomic time, but rather date back to when mean solar time was assumed to
be constant rate and therefore unchanging.
What, I wonder, did the various churches do about the Eleven Days? They can
hardly have been taken down and rebuilt at a slight angle, after all.
> At this critical point in world
> history, what possible justification could there be for truncating the
> discovery process for uncovering similar requirements placed on civil
> time by the great religions of the world before making a large change
> in the definition of civil time?
I have no problem with trying to identify the issues involved. But we can
reasonably ask whether the alignment of a few buildings in Oxfordshire [*]
is grounds for forcing the whole world to cope with the kludge of leap
seconds for the next thousand years.
[* Usual Cambridge-Oxford rivalry deleted for brevity.]
--
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Thus plc||
