Did the apostles and the early Church believe the Earth was flat?

Shrewd Manager said:

Earth is supposedly moving at an aggregate speed of at least 1 million kmh relative to your stars, but year after year, back around they come as a fixed unit.

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Living near the Cascades in Washington, I could walk, or even drive, several miles and it wouldn't change the the relative position of the mountains. They're really far away, and so my going a few miles isn't going to change their relative position.

Parallax, when you're driving on the freeway large and distant objects seem to be moving much slower.

The solar system is moving through the galaxy at over 800,000 km/h. The nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri, located 4.24 ly away (that's 40 trillion kilometers away). That means, for the nearest star to our solar system, we are moving around 800,000 km/h relative to an object 40,000,000,000,000 km away. For comparison, that's traveling 8km/h relative to an object 400,000,000 km away, or 4 meters an hour relative to an object 2 million kilometers away. That's about the average speed of a snail by the way. So at a literal snail's pace, relative to an object 2 million kilometers away.

No, we aren't going to be seeing the stars changing positions radically from year to year, even though we are moving at high speeds through space.

-CryptoLutheran

Jipsah said:

But in your universe, the sun doesn't rise and set, it circles. I think you'll find that to be in conflict with Scripture. Better repent before it's everlasting too late.

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Of course the sun "rises and sets." Doesn't Scripture state it? Why do you refer to Scripture at all when you can't even quote me a single verse which supports your spinning spherical earth?? Only when it suit your purpose? Its apparent to me that you don't even study what scripture states about the sun. For example the Hebrew word for "rise" is "zarach."
NAS Exhaustive Concordance
Word Origin
a prim. root
Definition
to rise, come forth
2 Samuel 23:4
HEB: וּכְא֥וֹר בֹּ֖קֶר יִזְרַח־ שָׁ֑מֶשׁ בֹּ֚קֶר
NAS: [when] the sun rises, A morning
KJV: [when] the sun riseth, [even] a morning
INT: is as the light of the morning rises the sun A morning
The sun is described as something which rises but in the following passage we find:
Genesis 32:31
HEB: וַיִּֽזְרַֽח־ ל֣וֹ הַשֶּׁ֔מֶשׁ
NAS: Now the sun rose upon him just
KJV: the sun rose upon him, and he halted
INT: rose now the sun he

Exodus 22:3
HEB: אִם־ זָרְחָ֥ה הַשֶּׁ֛מֶשׁ עָלָ֖יו
NAS: the sun has risen on him, there will be bloodguiltiness
KJV: If the sun be risen upon him, [there shall be] blood
INT: if has risen the sun on

Deuteronomy 33:2
HEB: מִסִּינַ֥י בָּא֙ וְזָרַ֤ח מִשֵּׂעִיר֙ לָ֔מוֹ
NAS: from Sinai, And dawned on them from Seir;
KJV: from Sinai, and rose up from Seir
INT: Sinai came and dawned Seir shone
In these passages it is quite apparent that the "rising of the sun" has nothing to do with referencing the elevation of the sun related the horizon. Rather, zarach refers to the sun which "comes forth." On the flat earth, the sun moves and circles the plane of the earth and comes forth with it's localized light at dawn thus making your argument moot. Better repent before it's too late.

Jipsah said:

BTW, got any Scripture on long path HF communications yet? Maybe it's enabled by demons, or strategically placed HF repeaters installed by the Jesuits to deceive the masses.

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Sorry but Scripture doesn't refer to long path HF communications but you might not know that given your handling of Scripture thus far.

ViaCrucis said:

Scripture doesn't mention the heliocentric model of the solar system because it wasn't known until centuries after the books of the Bible had already been written.

Here's the more important question: Why does the Bible need to say that the earth is spheroid and that it revolves around the sun? As though the Bible were the sole repository of all possible truth.

-CryptoLutheran

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Why does Scripture have to refer to the heliocentric man-made theory at all when it describes a geocentric model? The heliocentric models is opposed to Scripture. Up to you which model to subscribe to.
The Bible is indeed the sole repository of truth. It doesn't cover all truth but certainly enough to live and conduct our lives by. Perhaps a better question to ask yourself is if the earth is indeed flat, why have we been lied to? Hint: more to do with the firmament than the shape of the earth.

Oldmantook said:

Why does Scripture have to refer to the heliocentric man-made theory at all when it describes a geocentric model? The heliocentric models is opposed to Scripture. Up to you which model to subscribe to.
The Bible is indeed the sole repository of truth. It doesn't cover all truth but certainly enough to live and conduct our lives by. Perhaps a better question to ask yourself is if the earth is indeed flat, why have we been lied to? Hint: more to do with the firmament than the shape of the earth.

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No. The Bible is not the sole repository of truth. Nor does it pretend to be.

The Bible is a collection of many different books, various texts of many different kinds, which the Christian Church has received as divinely authoritative. For, as Christ our Lord says, "These bear witness to Me".

Jesus Christ is the Divine Subject of the Bible.

Not the shape of the earth.
Not the motions of the stars.

But Jesus Christ.

I don't look to the Bible to tell me what the shape of the earth is, because that's not the point of the Bible. The Bible has nothing to tell me about the shape and size of the earth, nor the motions of celestial bodies, nor how weather works. Because that isn't what the Bible is for.

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion." - St. Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad litteram

-CryptoLutheran

Yerp. Since the earth's equator is tilted off of the plane of the ecliptic, sometimes the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, and sometimes the southern is, and thus, seasons. But good old Polaris sits right where it is, and least for a long, long time.[/QUOTE]

Oldmantook said:

Why does Scripture have to refer to the heliocentric man-made theory at all

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Simple, it doesn't. The subject never comes up.

when it describes a geocentric model?

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Because it doesn't do that either. Have y'all ever actually read the Bible?

The heliocentric models is opposed to Scripture.

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Hogwash, much repeated, is still hogwash.

The Bible is indeed the sole repository of truth.

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Of course. Where else can you find the Pythagorian Theorem or Ohm's Law?

It doesn't cover all truth but certainly enough to live and conduct our lives by.

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Unless for some reason you need to know the Pythagorian Theorem or Ohm's Law, in which case you'll need another reference book or three. I have actually used both in the past, and was glad I wasn't required to get that information from Scripture. I also had to find out how to code a Fourier Transform in 8088 Assembly Language once, and I searched the Bible for it in vain. (As it turned out, I didn't find it anywhere else, either, so I had to do it from scratch, which was an exercise in misery. It worked, though, but we didn't have enough processor bandwidth to run it concurrently with our primary task, so we had to come up with a Plan B, which got the job done with the bandwidth we had available.

Perhaps a better question to ask yourself is if the earth is indeed flat, why have we been lied to?

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But happily, it isn't flat. God is the original engineer, and designed the cosmos with an elegance that no human could ever match. Makes the notions of geocentric universe that people contrive look like a Rube Goldberg cartoon Contest: Rube Goldberg Devices.

Hint: more to do with the firmament than the shape of the earth.

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Speaking of Rube Goldberg <Laugh>

Shrewd Manager said:

They say so, but the pics show that we'd need to see around the curve.

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No they don't.

Shrewd Manager said:

you're looking in opposite directions each 6 months, even allowing for your axial tilt.

[EDIT: Doesn't seem to present my little diagram upon posting, you should get the idea]

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Ah, I get what you mean now. I was thinking in terms of viewing towards the celestial poles where you see the same stars all year round, but towards the celestial equator we do indeed see different stars in a cycle of one year. You might have noticed that is what the pagan signs of the zodiac are based on.

Here's another simple experiment you can do. On a clear night, put a camera on a tripod and point it towards the celestial south pole (where the axis of the Southern Cross meets the line bisecting an perpendicular to The Pointers. Set your aperture small to limit the light so it doesn't overexpose, then take a really long exposure photograph. In the resulting photo, the stars will form streaks of light circling the celestial south pole. This of course is not possible on the flat earth model.

Shrewd Manager said:

I'm not buying your pagan fairy tales.

Earth is supposedly moving at an aggregate speed of at least 1 million kmh relative to your stars, but year after year, back around they come as a fixed unit.

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Our Sun is one star in an arm of a spiral galaxy that is slowly rotating. The most visible stars are the ones relatively close to us which are also moving in the same relative direction, so your above claim is nonsense.

Shrewd Manager said:

No, I mean how the atmosphere manages to rotate in lockstep with the earth, meaning that the speed at every increasing altitude must increase - how do the air particles communicate this motion to each other? And without any delay and allowing for winds to blow, clouds to roll by and so forth?

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Conservation of momentum and fluid dynamics. It is simple physics.

Shrewd Manager said:

Gyros have rigidity in space so they would be useless in a plane. If you took off at the pole, you'd be flying perpendicular when you reached the equator.

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The auto correction mechanism of the artificial horizon in an aeroplane has already been described in this thread, but since you didn't seem to get it, here is a 2 minute video explaining how it works.

Shrewd Manager said:

Fascinating study. But it would have to be of the superman variety to account for the likes of this.

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Not at all. It is entirely consistent with the bending of light through the atmosphere

Jipsah said:

you believe that the in the Bible those words to be taken literally, as ours are not. This is wrong, as even a cursory observation of what God has actually made, as opposed to what you think God really meant, proves. In short, you believe that your interpretation of Scripture should carry more authority that what God actually made. Fat chance.

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If the HS employs imperfect metaphor and figures of speech then the Bible is not inerrant. If the Bible teaches, for instance, that the earth will be turned as clay to the seal, you can be sure the image of a flatbed of clay imprinted with God's imprimatur is a perfect analogy. Or again, the pillars of the earth both denotes and connotes immobility, fixedness and strength.

In the use of these metaphors the truth of both natural and spiritual is affirmed. The hermeneutical senses of any passage need to agree. Apart from devaluing and confusing the holy scriptures, it's blasphemy against the spirit to suggest that he engages in falsehood in some sense. You should really repent of that.

This is one reason the Bible is provably a work of supernatural authorship, and why the greatest writers in history, including Shakespeare, Goethe and Dostoyevsky, stood in awe. but no doubt you're an unsung authority on hermeneutics as well as a world class engineer, mathematician and astrophysicist. Who am I to argue.

Jipsah said:

Hey, I've asked to explain something as workaday as long path HF propagation, and you either won't or can't.

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Scripture goes to some lengths to describe the glorious work of creation. There is no reason to deny the plain literal sense of passages describing physical creation. It's a false premise to suggest that 'Because no yagi antenna, therefore no cosmology'. That's just desperate and sad, I'm afraid. Either conform your mind to Christ or find a new religion.

Jipsah said:

That's the dumbest thing Flatties harp on. Good grief, man, have you never seen a road? Roads go up mountains, around curves, over bridges, and under rivers. At what point does the curve of the earth become relevant?

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Yes it undulates. But the topography is surveyed and charted. The supposed curve ought to be relevant to precise engineering calculations as the very basis of the plan. Either it's designed-up on an arc or on a plane. This is I presume why engineer W Winckler remarks that they don't waste time trying to square the circle.

Jipsah said:

It's like noting that they didn't allow for the procession of the equinoxes (does that happen in your universe?) or the Doppler Effect

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It's precession, I don't think you understand the concept of equivalence between heliocentric and geocentric coordinate systems.

Redshift and blueshift are interpreted as doppler. Even if this is true, as Hubble found to his horror, this would put the earth in a unique position at the centre of the universe.
The Observational Approach to Cosmology

ViaCrucis said:

-CryptoLutheran

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A pitiful testament to the power of satanic indoctrination.

Shrewd,
have you taken that long exposure photo of the southern night sky yet?

prodromos said:

Shrewd,
have you taken that long exposure photo of the southern night sky yet?

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Sorry I'm too busy wading through turkey droppings right now.

Shrewd Manager said:

Sorry I'm too busy wading through turkey droppings right now.

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Post it when you do.

prodromos said:

Post it when you do.

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While you're waiting, maybe I can interest you in winning the big bucks in one of the many 'prove the globe earth challenges'. And before you complain it's not judged impartially, consider you have recourse to the courts. It's been tried, but thus far unsuccessfully:

Shrewd Manager said:

While you're waiting, maybe I can interest you in winning the big bucks in one of the many 'prove the globe earth challenges'. And before you complain it's not judged impartially, consider you have recourse to the courts. It's been tried, but thus far unsuccessfully:

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I'll pass it on to Dr Lazoudis. He can probably make good use of the winnings.

ViaCrucis said:

The nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri, located 4.24 ly away (that's 40 trillion kilometers away).

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Prove it.

prodromos said:

I'll pass it on to Dr Lazoudis. He can probably make good use of the winnings.

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Go ahead, I'd be interested to see how it goes. I believe Zen Garcia has a standing offer.

Oldmantook said:

Isaiah 40:22 does not state that the earth is round. In that verse, the word "circle" or "chug in Hebrew - by definition is two dimensional. Round by definition is three dimensional. Therefore, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit Isaiah described the earth as a two-dimensional flat circle. Furthermore in Isaiah 22:18, he used the word "ball" or "dur" in Hebrew. Thus Isaiah knew the difference between a circle and a ball/orb but used the word circle instead of ball to describe the shape of he earth.

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The word Isaiah would have used to describe a disc shaped world is "עֻגָּה" (uggah), whereas he used the word "חוּג" (chug) which means "vault" or "horizon".
Isaiah is not describing a flat earth.

As for the ship going over the horizon scenario, one can simply take a pair of powerful binoculars and when the ship disappears "over the horizon", it reappears and comes into view using the binoculars disproving the round earth.

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As for the ship going over the horizon scenario, you are completely wrong. When looking through binoculars or a telescope you simply get a bigger clearer image of a ship hull down over the horizon.

Shrewd Manager said:

If the HS employs imperfect metaphor and figures of speech then the Bible is not inerrant.

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Then you're declaring that the Bible is in error, 'cause stuff in it isn't written the way you think it ought to be. So noted. Hold your own opinion in high esteem, don'tcha?

You should really repent of that.

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I see little need to repent of sharing your particular folly. I assume that you're speaking ex cathedra and are thus infallible, but I think even less of your infallibility than I do the pope's. Especially considering that the opinion you declare to be equivalent of holy writ directly contradicts what a child can observe to be true of God's creation.

This is one reason the Bible is provably a work of supernatural authorship, and why the greatest writers in history, including Shakespeare, Goethe and Dostoyevsky, stood in awe. but no doubt you're an unsung authority on hermeneutics as well as a world class engineer, mathematician and astrophysicist. Who am I to argue.

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God's Word is awe inspiring, your silly notions of what it really means are considerably less so. You're trying to jam your personal beliefs into Scripture and then claim "this saith the Lord". Every heresiarch in history has done the same. They've all declared their own claptrap to be the True Meaning of Scripture, and been quick to pronounce anathemas on those who failed to failed to pronounce them The One True Way. In addition to being a world class engineer, mathematician and astrophysicist, I read a fair bit of history, and noted many accounts of people finding new and marvelous "truths" in the Bible, and managing to gather numbers of credulous ninnies who hang on their every nonsensical word. They come, and they go, and it will be so until the Lord returns. I have no time for that kind of codswallop.

Scripture goes to some lengths to describe the glorious work of creation. There is no reason to deny the plain literal sense of passages describing physical creation.

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None, other than the fact that what you claim is the Real Meaning of those words is contrary to how the universe actually works. Fairly major disconnect there. I'm supposed to believe you and ignore what's outside my window. You lose.

It's a false premise to suggest that 'Because no yagi antenna, therefore no cosmology

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Stlll haven't come up with a glib "explanation" that, have you? None of your lot ever have. Easily understood in the universe as God made it, impossible to account for in in your Rube Goldberg cosmos. Pathetic.

Either conform your mind to Christ or find a new religion.

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Yeah, the peddler of heresies always says that you have to agree with his crud or you're not a Real Christian. Sorry, OM, there's no market for your lunacy here. If I needed a pope I'd join the RCC. I sure don't need the revelations of someone who's trying to disinvent the wheel, and who preaches stuff that's so laughably untrue that only the semi-literate can keep straight faces on hearing it.

Yes it undulates. But the topography is surveyed and charted. The supposed curve ought to be relevant to precise engineering calculations as the very basis of the plan. Either it's designed-up on an arc or on a plane. This is I presume why engineer W Winckler remarks that they don't waste time trying to square the circle.

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Oh give it a rest. You're aren't an engineer, and haven't a clue what you're talking about. Those last few sentences of pure gibberish makes that plain.

Your religion is bunk. Your cosmology is bunk. What does that leave?

Shrewd Manager said:

Prove it.

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Wanna see the math?

Shrewd Manager said:

While you're waiting, maybe I can interest you in winning the big bucks in one of the many 'prove the globe earth challenges'. And before you complain it's not judged impartially, consider you have recourse to the courts. It's been tried, but thus far unsuccessfully:

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Got a copy of the court's ruling? I'd like to see what they said.