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.] -- Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Tel: +44 20 8495 6138 Internet Expert | Home: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Fax: +44 870 051 9937 Demon Internet | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Mobile: +44 7973 377646 Thus plc | |