On Demythologising

Posted on October 30, 2017 
Filed under Resources

“A pocket diary can be a mine of information.

Lest you be tempted to forget, and go to work when you should stay at home, it lists the Public Holidays. It carries a range of postal information. It may include such valuable information as that russet brown is a combination of orange and purple, or that sound travels at the rate of 1,132 feet per second. …

And sometimes they include succinct statements that the sun rises at such and such a time, and sets at a certain hour.

It is with this latter pair of statements that we are concerned.

Who, we might ask, are these compilers, who apparently belong to the Middle Ages, for they think that the sun rises and sets, whereas the veriest schoolboy in these enlightened days knows that the sun does neither?…”

– The latest post from the Australian Church Record archives, by Leon Morris.