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On 10/3/2010 8:03 PM, David & Alison Webster wrote:
> Haldane appears to have ignored the debates, in Roger Bacon's time,
> about how many angels could sit on the head of a pin. These tiny angels
> could no doubt fly with ease but how would an illustrator get one to sit
> still long enough to be painted ? Probably why they painted only large
> angels.
* believe the assumption was that the angels, as spiritual beings, had a
lower density than than ordinary Human Persons, just as, when they
crowded around a pinhead, they had a reduced physical extent. Julian
Jaynes showed that the "wings" of angels were a representation of
radiance that surrounded hallucinated angelic presences, so that those
who portrayed them with avian-style wings hadn't really seen very many
of them.
On the other hand, when my father was in divinity school, a fellow
student tricked a professor into affirming that a certain theologian had
been writing about the existence of "concrete" angels, and was able, for
the rest of the term, to break up the class by referencing _concrete_
angels (with their implied greater density than ordinary Human Persons.
fred.
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Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
now in the field on the Thirty Years Later Expedition -
http://fragileinheritance.org/projects/thirty/thirtyintro.htm
Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
(613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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