Flat or round earth -The final experiment.

[Strong in Him]

Yes & in the book of Job & you know what ? I believe every word.

Never said that you didn't.
I, too, believe that God created the universe; I am certain that everyone else here does also.

 

[Apple Sky]

I, too, believe that God created the universe; I am certain that everyone else here does also.

Good I'm glad

 

[Jipsah]

from the NASA side of the fence!

Ergo suspiciously literate.

 

[Jipsah]

But these flat earth models do not work. How many times you need to be reminded this. They do not explain even the basic things we observe and when they try, they contradict themselves.

Yeah, but pillars...

 

[Jipsah]

As do yours.

Ours work, otherwise I couldn't get from Nashville to London (and back) to watch football, and that would be dreadful.

 

[Jipsah]

What is it anchored to?
What is it rooted in?
What is it riveted to, and who found bolts strong enough to rivet it?
What is it moored to?
How did the writers know it was anchored?
Were they writing a scientific statement about the earth? Because if you think they were, you surely have to acknowledge that their statements would change as people discovered more.
People learn; all the time. I doubt that anyone in Paul's day would have thought that people would one day sit in a long, heavy metal tube and fly off to another country to preach the Gospel. I imagine that if anyone had told them that, one day, people would sit in front of a machine, type words onto a screen, press a button and share the Gospel with folk on the other side of the world, they would have declared it to be a miracle. The Bible doesn't say that these things will happen one day. Jesus said, "go into the world ..." not "sit in front of a computer". Does that mean it's wrong? Of course not. We have learned and developed technology to make sharing the Gospel easier, so we use it.

IF the earth was fixed in the sky - suspended by something; anchored to something else, then scientists today would agree and post pictures etc.
But they don't and it's not.
There is no enormously long chain which anchors the earth to something.
It is well known that the earth revolves around the sun - and takes a year to do so.
It is well known that the earth rotates on its own axis - and takes a day to do so.
That Genesis doesn't say, "then God created the sun around which all planets revolve", does not mean it doesn't happen.
The purpose of Genesis 1 is to say that GOD created - not to give minute scientific details about how he did it.

I hope that you never find yourself talking to non-Christian scientists. They'd destroy your arguments in minutes - and then leave with the impression that Christians are ignorant and don't know what they are talking about.

Bravo!

 

[Jipsah]

No thanks, once was fine & I thanked you for it for putting your explanation of a globe, which doesn't make it true.

Maybe not, but it did make flat earth false.

 

[Jipsah]

Don't ever forget that water always finds it's own level.

What does that mean, precisely?

 

[Jipsah]

You have a telescope. Use it.

Maybe he can see the cord that suspends the lightbulb from the top of the snowglobe.

 

[The Liturgist]

Ah, the Conspiracy will out, won't it? And of course, with a conspiracy of this magnititude, more than half the world has to be In On It. It's all about proving Genesis false.

Onliest problem with that (well, OK, there are a shload of problems with it, but nevermind that now) is that most Christians believe Genesis to be mostly figurative anyway. They believe Genesis to an account of what God has done rather than how He did it. They believe that God created everything, and they also believe the Earth is round, and that it orbits the sun, and all the other stuff that we know to be true by simple observation. They don't expect Genesis to be scientifically accurate, because it's not a scientific writing. I mean, duh! We all say "the sun rose this morning", but we know that it isn't a technical description of what happened. It's what look likes happened, and everybody understands it. No conspiracy necessary. But that doesn't hinder y'all from creating one, does it? And like most conspiracies, it's almost purely fantasy.

So the good news is that 98.537% of Christians, and 99.975% of everyone else, will think you lot are a bunch of loonies, I'm a bit more charitable than that, but not by much.

So no, no one with a functioning brain thinks Genesis is a lie because it uses archaic slanguage and symbolism. They don't expect it to be a technical dissertation. The vast,vast majority of believers are entirely comfortable with it.

The downside is that pretty much all unbelievers think your lot are barking mad and ready for the rubber room, and they all see you as representative of Christians as a whole, insignificant though your numbers may be. They hear you, and think "If that's what Christians believe then Christians are lunatics. But of course, you can reassure them that not all Christians believe the stuff you do, but only the real Christians. Yeah, thanks a lot.

So hey, congratlations of your driving unbelievers away from the Christian faith like a large hawk scares away clouds of pigeons, assuming that was your intention. Otherwise...

Actually I think more Christians reject Flat Earth than members of the general public. Most of the world’s Flat Earth-believing population consists of Islamic fundamentalists, since Muhammad taught that the world was flat, that the decline of sails on ships at the horizon was an optical illusion, and the Quran records a figure who was probably meant to be Alexander the Great traveling to the westernmost part of the world and having a conversation with the Sun after it set, when the Sun was chilling in a tranquil pool, resting before it had to flee East in order to rise again.

Obviously that model is incompatible with a spherical Earth, but Muslims realized that early on, and so all but the most extremist forms of Islam quickly implemented creative workarounds (which I regard as being similar to the interpretations people coerce out of Scripture to get a Flat Earth interpretation, in that Scripture really does speak of the Earth according to its true spherical geometry whereas the Quran really was recited orally by an Arab merchant who was not himself literate, but who was a somewhat good poet, although I think he was probably posessed or influenced by a demon impersonating the Archangel Gabriel at the start, and then, as often happens with demons, it withdrew its support, resulting in Muhammed uttering some verses which were greatly unpopular, which he later rescinded (the novel, the Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie, has these verses as a theme, and recently he was horribly maimed by an Islamic fundamentalist, the closest one has come to killing him).

Additionally many of the leading flat Earth conspiracy theorists are atheists. So I think your numbers are actually likely backwards - more Christians than not believe the world is round. In part because the Flat Earth conspiracy theory requires accusing a very large number of people of engaging in intentional dishonesty, which is not something most Christians are comfortable with.

 

[The Liturgist]

I don't have much use for internet pontifs who tell me that one must believe whatever jive interpretation of Scripture they're peddling. I've been reading the Bible since before you were born, and never met anyone who felt that it required a belief in a flat earth. Then again, most of the people I grew up with believed that the Bible was all about Jesus, not with the shape of the world. I mean, I see lots of places where the disciples "preached unto them Jesus", but none where thewy preached a flat earth or a 6 day creation. What were they missing?

Actually, as you are doubtless aware, in the conclusion of the Gospel of Luke, our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ “opened the books” for the Disciples and showed them how all the books of the Law and Prophets were in fact about Him. All of the Old Testament is Christological prophecy, first and foremost. There is usually a secondary literal-historical context, which is why the most successful Early Church Fathers used both the Alexandrian typological-allegorical hermeneutic and the Antiochene literal-historical hermeneutic, and those who were most associated with a purely Alexandrian and Antiochene approach, Origen and Theodore of Mopsuestia respectively, were anathematized in the Three Chapters of Justinian prior to the Fifth Ecumenical Synod.

Now I actually oppose their anathematization, because neither of them was a schismatic or intentionally heretical - it was alleged that Origen had inspired Arius but there was no causal link to show this, and ardent supporters of Origen such as St. Lucifer, the bishop of Cagliari (Lucifer was a fairly common name and was not regarded as the proper name of the devil for many centuries; indeed there were several early Christian martyrs named Lucifer - rather, Lucifer is a Latin translation of “the bearer of light” which referred directly to Nebuchadnezzar, and typologically to the devil, who is frequently described as appearing as “an angel of light”) were opposed to Arius as much as St. Jerome or St. Epiphanios of Salamis, who were extremely anti-Origen. Likewise the works of Theodore of Mopsuestia were used by Nestorius in support of his heresy, but much of what Theodore wrote was edifying and interesting, and he was the best friend of St. John Chrysostom, and his anathema caused a schism in the Spanish church known as the Three Chapters Controversy which persisted throughout much of the fourth century.

However, the mere fact that they got into this controversy, whereas figures such as St. Athanasius and the Cappadocians and St. John Chrysostom, while arguably forming a spectrum from leaning toward Alexandrian hermeneutics in the case of St. Athanasius, to leaning towards the hermeneutics of Antioch in the case of St. Chrysostom, for St. Athanasius was Patriarch of Alexandria and St. Chrysostom was ordained a priest in Antioch and preached many of his most famous sermons there, before being consecrated Patriarch of Constantinople in the 390s, avoided such controversy and are equally beloved by everyone, shows the benefits of a combined approach.

Now, the interesting thing about Genesis 1 is that it can be interpreted in a manner consistent with our scientific knowledge of the origins of the Universe, which is something no other creation story from any other religion can claim (except of course for those religions which also use the Pentateuch or a version of it, such as Samaritanism and the various forms of Judaism, but many of these religions, such as Mormonism, have material which provides an interpretation of these verses which is contrary to science).

However, the main thrust of Genesis 1 is clearly about the passion of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ. He is the light of the World, and he arrived in Jerusalem on the First Day of Holy Week. On the Sixth Day, He remade Man in His image on the Cross, before resting on the seventh, with Pascha representing the mystical Eighth Day of Creation, the World to Come (this is a fairly common Orthodox exegesis).

Now, not all of the Christians on CF.com who believe in a Flat Earth lack a Christocentricity in their posts, but some of them do, and furthermore all of them do accuse a very large number of people of lying, which I regard as a dangerous activity, since it is inherently sinful to falsely accuse someone of lying, and the number of people who have been implicated in the Flat Earth conspiracy theory as intentionally dishonest is truly staggering when you consider how many people in professional positions, who know, as a result of their work, that the world is round, and that manned spaceflight is real, and that we visited the Moon, is in the tens of millions, since it encompasses the majority of professionals in the aerospace and maritime industries as well as most people who have anything to do with radio, for example, the vast majority of amateur radio enthusiasts.

And there is ready proof that the world is round, if only they would listen - the flights between the Southern Continents, which could not operate with their posted timetables if the world was flat, but would instead take an astronomical length of time. Even Concorde would take a ridiculous amount of time operating that service.

 

[The Liturgist]

Why dont you use it then? If you caught the ISS or any of the satellites, you debunked your own view, easily and quickly. There are many instructions online how to see the ISS or satellites, through a telescope.

There’s really no need to use it. The flights in the southern hemisphere, even those which are merely trans-continental, would take impossibly long times according to the map that she uses.

@prodromos perhaps you might have the fortitude, as I do not, to work out the exact time a SYD-PER sector would take following that Flat Earth map in which Australia is distorted to an insane width? And Africa gets stretched so much, that even at the equator, or just above it, in the Northern Hemisphere, the flights become impossibly long. Flights like Accra to Nairobi, instead of taking five and a half hours, would take by my estimation twelve hours, at a minimum. And in the case of Australia, the distance from SYD-PER, rather than being just over five hours, looks like it would be at least nine hours. And likewise for Santiago to Rio de Janeiro (SCL-GRU). Or LIM-GRU (Lima - Rio). Or even routes like KUL-DEL become dramatically longer, since the map becomes progressively more distorted as one moves away from the North Pole, and distances become extended to an impossible extent.

 

[The Liturgist]

To make things even harder for you, did you know that the Bible translators in the 16th century decided to use the Masoretic text to translate the Old Testament from (just because it was in Hebrew), but the New Testament used frequently different textual versions? And so the 16th century translators created many internal inconsistencies between the Old Testament and what the New Testament writers quoted, which lasts till today in the most of current Bible translations?

Do you wish to see examples? I know you do, you are curious, right?

BTW, did you know there are at least three different versions of the book of Daniel?

Indeed, in the Orthodox Church we use the Septuagint, or in the case of the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Peshitta, with the extra five books of the New Testament from the Athanasian canon added from the translation of St. Thomas of Harqel (whereas the Assyrian Church of the East, while accepting those books as canon, does not use them in the lectionary, and thus continues to use the 22 book Peshitta), or in the case of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Ge’ez bible. And there are other ancient versions still in use.

Two of the most interesting in terms of the New Testament are the Vetus Latina, which remains in use in the traditional Latin Mass and other Western liturgies - it is the source of the phrase “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” which the Vulgate translates as the much less pretty “Gloria in Altissimus Deo”, and the Vetus Syra (which consists only of the four canonical Gospels, but was translated as quickly as possible to replace the Diatessaron, a Gospel harmony compiled by Tatian, which was initially the only Syriac translation of the Gospels but which was suspected of being heretical, because Tatian did become the founder of a Gnostic sect related to those of Bardesanes and Severian, and also Gospel harmonies tend to be horrible, because they replace the lively individual Gospels with a mundane, mushed together text. It has been possible to reconstruct the Diatessaron from fragments and information about its contents, and I found it really lame, almost as bad as the Jefferson Bible. At any rate, the Vetus Latina and Vetus Syra constitute the only known examples of the Western Text Type, which is slightly different from the Alexandrian text type one finds in the Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Vaticanus, and the Byzantine text type one finds pretty much everywhere else. These differences, it should be stressed, are minor, contrary to what some people say.

 

[The Liturgist]

Actually Tesco is wholly owned by Satan. He's trying to take over the grocery business.

Worth every cent of the price charged.

Does Tesco even operate in North America? I only recall seeing their stores in Europe.

 

[The Liturgist]

Yes & in the book of Job & you know what ? I believe every word.

So do I, and I do not see any evidence of Genesis describing a flat Earth. It clearly defines our globular Earth.

In the case of Job, God does not actually say that the Earth has a foundation, merely that Job does not know its measurements, however, we can assert that the foundation of our world is the entire subterranean structure of the Planet Earth, down to the molten core, which is mostly molten metal under enormous pressure, and the rotation of the core produces the magnetic dynamo that shields the Earth and the Moon from the deadly radiation emitted by the Sun whenever there is a Coronal Mass Ejection (Solar Flare) as well as other astronomical phenomena, such as gamma ray bursts.

 

[Apple Sky]

So do I, and I do not see any evidence of Genesis describing a flat Earth. It clearly defines our globular Earth.

Where ?

 

[Apple Sky]

What does that mean, precisely?

Google it.

 

[Apple Sky]

Satan counterfeits everything that God has made even us humans.

God created a level unmovable earth with the sun, moon & all the stars set in the firmament which rotates daily.

Satan has created the dead opposite.

 

[The Liturgist]

Satan counterfeits everything that God has made even us humans.

God created a level unmovable earth with the sun, moon & all the stars set in the firmament which rotates daily.

Satan has created the dead opposite.

That’s false, it doesn’t say that in Genesis, and Scripture makes it clear that Satan has no power, and additionally we see no evidence of the devil engaging in any act that could be regarded as creative.

 

[prodromos]

Google it.

This is what I found