Another mythbuster: heliocentrism

Nice little piece at Design of Life: showing that the myth that the heliocentric view of the solar system was a 'demotion' for the earth. "In fact, ancient and medieval Arabic, Jewish, and Christian scholars believed that the center was the worst part of the universe, a kind of squalid basement where all the muck collected. One medieval writer described Earth's location as 'the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world.' We humans, another asserted, are 'lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, and most remote from the heavenly arch.' In 1615 Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a prominent persecutor of Galileo, said that 'the Earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world.' [ ... ] By contrast, heaven was up, and the further up you went, away from the center, the better it was. So Copernicus, by putting the Sun at the center and Earth in orbit around it, was really giving its inhabitants a promotion by taking them closer to the heavens."