[Sybeck1]

Could it be the return to teaching of a flat Earth,


I wish you guys would try a little more decorum than that:

The passage saying the earth is round is Isaiah 40:22:

He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.


The shape of the earth may already have been known in Isaiah's time. Ancient astronomers could determine that the earth was round by observing its circular shadow move across the moon during lunar eclipses. There is some suggestion that the Egyptians knew of the earth's spherical size and shape around 2550 B.C.E. (more than a thousand years before Moses). The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who was born in 532 B.C.E., defended the spherical theory on the basis of observations he had made of the shape of the sun and moon (Uotila 1984). If this information was known by educated Greeks and Egyptians during biblical times, its use by Isaiah is nothing special.

[Right Wing Professor]

A circle is not a sphere. How do you pitch a tent on a sphere? The imagery clearly shows the Israelites thought the earth was flat.

[Dataman]

The only flat-earthers are the evolutionists who seem to be unusually attracted to creating and believing hoaxes.

The Myth of the Flat Earth

Summary by Jeffrey Burton Russell

for the American Scientific Affiliation Conference

August 4, 1997 at Westmont College

click on the frame border for the document

[js1138]

He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.

It's good to see that some people accept that large portions of the Bible are metaphor. It should be obvious that reality is the arbiter of when the Bible is literal and when it is metaphorical.

Those who think they can discern the difference without research and investigation seem to be displaying an amazing degree of vanity.

[js1138]

I might add that some people have such contempt for creation that they mock it by implying that physical reality is somehow defective or unclean or unreal.

[R. Scott]

The shape of the earth may already have been known in Isaiah's time. Ancient astronomers could determine that the earth was round by observing its circular shadow move across the moon during lunar eclipses.

The common mariner or anyone living or working by the sea would also see that the Earth was a ball by noticing that when a ship leaves port and proceeds to sea the hull disappears before the mast. I think the Flat Earth was an attempt by the Roman Church to restrict education to only what they approved of.

The passage saying the earth is round is Isaiah 40:22:

Revelations 7 speaks of the four corners of the Earth – how can a ball have four corners?
I think the Flat Earth was an attempt by the Roman Church to restrict education to only what they approved of, and there was a time when Revelations was held in very high esteem. Some still pay more attention to Revelations than other chapters.