Religion, Science and God

The theory of cyclic time - the idea that the time dimension can be described as a circle (what, in terms of the General Theory of Relativity, is termed a 'closed time-like curve' , or CTC), and should not be depicted as a straight line - was advocated in the West in the Modern Era by  Giambattista Vico (Giovanni Battista Vico, 1668-1744), whose philosophy of time inspired the structure of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake  ( sic ; 1939), and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose 'Superman' ( Übermensch )  is marked, inter alia , by his ability to cope with the idea of eternal recurrence . This idea found its first advocates in the West in the Stoics , and their founder Zeno of Citium ( c. 336-265 BCE), although it should be noted that Nietzsche employed an argument he derived from the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander of Miletus ( c .610-546 BCE) in his  Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen ( Philosophy in the Tragic [Ancient] Age of the...

Father Gabriele Amorth (1925-2016) was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1954, and served as an Exorcist of the Diocese of Rome from June 1986, at first under the supervision of  Candido Amantini , and subsequently as Chief Exorcist of the Diocese (the 'Pope's Exorcist'). He has been portrayed by the actor Russell Crowe in the film, The Pope's Exorcist  (2023). Amorth, with five other Catholic priests, co-founded the  Associazione internazionale degli esorcisti , the  International Association of Exorcists, in 1990, and it was formally recognised by the Roman Catholic Church in 2014. Besides claiming, inter alia , that yoga and the Harry Potter books are the work of the Devil, and that participating in the former and reading the latter will result in eternal damnation for those doing so, the late Father Amorth claimed to have performed no fewer than 160,000 exorcisms during the course of his career. This claim was made in May 2013, according to the Huffington Post...