Flat Earth And Christianity

[Hans Blaster]

Oh really? Then who do you think started the persecution of Christians that began during his reign and grew in intensity before subsiding greatly from the reign of Trajan, until the reign of Commodus, when it resumed at a level of extreme horror?

Perhaps no one. The claims all seem tied to Tacitus, particularly the "Nero blamed the Fire of Rome on the Christians" one and Tacitus wasn't exactly a Nero fan.

I would also note the evidence for most events in antiquity is thin, but the evidence for Nero as a persecutor is thicker than most.

And yet the rest of your post offers no such evidence, just demonstration of the thinness of *other* ancient claims. Oh well.

 

[Jude1:3Contendforthefaith]

In this case trying to get 3 consecutive 6s to appear in a number to claim it is the sign of the devil or whatever.

14 Different Coincidental Times Huh ?

 

[HantsUK]

Where the extreme cold is moving at 0.00005mph doesn't sound pleasant.

Absolutely

 

[Hans Blaster]

14 Different Coincidental Times Huh ?

Yes, coincidence. Any one with the time a slight bit of cleverness can find any number "buried" in a large enough collection of values. This bag of garbage:

So Many Times Right ?

is no different. It uses what ever units are convenient to find a "6 - 6 - 6" sequence (for length alone there are miles, nautical miles a, and astronomical units) and when that isn't enough you could always do a bit of math to make the numerology work out. Let's take a few that haven't been already smashed to pieces.

1. Temperature of Venus. Blending the temperature of any object by combining two different temperature scales is utterly meaningless. A harmonic mean neither helps nor hinders the utter nonsensicalness of the unit "blending" as you can't just mix units willy-nilly in a calculation.

2. The circumference of the Earth. Here's one of those multiply ones 6*6*6*10^something. It would be shocking if it wasn't since THAT'S HOW THE NAUTICAL MILE WAS DEFINED. A nautical mile is one minute of the equator. A minute is 1/60 of a degree and there are 360 degrees so their are 21600 nautical miles around the equator or 60 * 360 nautical miles. A little refactoring to 6*10*6*6*10 doesn't make it a hidden 666. (If you think the 60 factors are weird thank the Babylonians who gave us time and angles broken in to 60s, the 7-day week and the story of the ark in the great flood.) (Did you know the distance between the equator and the pole is almost exactly 10,000 km? Well that's how the meter was originally defined.)

3. Astron-not jab was quite the denigration of America's most experienced space traveler who at one point had spent 665 d 22 h in space, but has now spent an additional 3 weeks up there earlier this year on a private mission.

You can do it with any number, especially if you're willing to play some simple, but stupid math games.

 

[JSRG]

14 Different Coincidental Times Huh ?

You can only get up to 14 apparently by fudging numbers. For example, it says "the speed of sound is 666 knots per second". First, knot is a measurement of speed, so knots per second is like saying "miles per hour per second." It should simply say "knots" rather than the nonsensical "knots per second". Second, if I look it up, it seems the number is 667 knots, not 666. Thus the numbers seem fudged. Third and finally, even if it was 666 knots, why does the matter? What relation does the speed of sound have to a round Earth? None! The speed of sound would be the same whether the Earth was flat or round. A rather impressive number of errors it managed in the space of nine words!

As noted earlier, I have no idea where the claim of gravity being 666 newtons comes from, as far as I can tell it's 9.8.

It claims Peggy Whitson spend 666 days in space. This seems to be a false claim. Now, I assume the graphic was made a while ago, because due to a new trip this year she's up to more days than that (see Peggy Whitson: Record-Holding Astronaut). So even if that was true in the past, it's no longer true, and thus it's defunct. But this seems to have been a false claim even when that chart was made, because before the current trip, she had spent 665 days in space (see https://www.npr.org/2023/05/22/1177567288/spacex-nasa-peggy-whitson-iss-international-space-station), so this seems to be another case of the chart fudging the numbers.

I expect if I were to look into more of them, I would find even more errors. This is to not even get into how desperate some of these are (having to change between different units to find its numbers) or the fact that any that are not six hundred and sixty-six on the dot are completely irrelevant anyway, because the Book of Revelation calls that out as the number, not anything that just happens to have three 6's in it.

 

[Jude1:3Contendforthefaith]

Yes, coincidence. Any one with the time a slight bit of cleverness can find any number "buried" in a large enough collection of values. This bag of garbage:



is no different. It uses what ever units are convenient to find a "6 - 6 - 6" sequence (for length alone there are miles, nautical miles a, and astronomical units) and when that isn't enough you could always do a bit of math to make the numerology work out. Let's take a few that haven't been already smashed to pieces.

1. Temperature of Venus. Blending the temperature of any object by combining two different temperature scales is utterly meaningless. A harmonic mean neither helps nor hinders the utter nonsensicalness of the unit "blending" as you can't just mix units willy-nilly in a calculation.

2. The circumference of the Earth. Here's one of those multiply ones 6*6*6*10^something. It would be shocking if it wasn't since THAT'S HOW THE NAUTICAL MILE WAS DEFINED. A nautical mile is one minute of the equator. A minute is 1/60 of a degree and there are 360 degrees so their are 21600 nautical miles around the equator or 60 * 360 nautical miles. A little refactoring to 6*10*6*6*10 doesn't make it a hidden 666. (If you think the 60 factors are weird thank the Babylonians who gave us time and angles broken in to 60s, the 7-day week and the story of the ark in the great flood.) (Did you know the distance between the equator and the pole is almost exactly 10,000 km? Well that's how the meter was originally defined.)

3. Astron-not jab was quite the denigration of America's most experienced space traveler who at one point had spent 665 d 22 h in space, but has now spent an additional 3 weeks up there earlier this year on a private mission.

You can do it with any number, especially if you're willing to play some simple, but stupid math games.

If all else fails, just Gas Light and Lie Right ?

 

[Hans Blaster]

If all else fails, just Gas Light and Lie Right ?

Where did I lie?

 

[prodromos]

If all else fails, just Gas Light and Lie Right ?

That does appear to be your modus operandi.

 

[The Liturgist]

Perhaps no one. The claims all seem tied to Tacitus, particularly the "Nero blamed the Fire of Rome on the Christians" one and Tacitus wasn't exactly a Nero fan.

Wait just a minute - are you claiming the persecutions didn’t happen? Because we have a mountain of textual evidence to support that. If your argument was that it was a different Emperor who caused it, or someone else, or other factors in Roman society, I could accept that, but denying the persecution is absurd given the large number of accounts about it we have from both the early Church and from secular sources in Roman society, including Emperor Trajan himself. For it would make no sense for Trajan to write a letter to a regional governor telling him to no longer actively hunt down Christians as this was contrary to the contemporary way of doing things, had that not once been the case (indeed St. Ignatius was martyred, if I recall, shortly after Trajan became Emperor; the martyrdoms did not stop under Trajan, but the active hunting of Christians in a manner that was later eerily evoked by the Inquisition, the Gestapo, and Communist security forces such as the Securitate of Romania, the Stasi of the DDR and the Chekists of the Soviet Union, especially under Lenin and Stalin, did stop or was rather reduced under Trajan to a large extent, and things remained relatively quiet for the Church until the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, at which time the persecution once more entered a phase of high activity, particularly as the disastrous third century progressed, the various Emperors and other civic leaders of the Empire blamed its numerous woes such as pestilences and natural disasters on the “superstition” of Christians who refused to submit to the “piety” of the State Religion and its associated Pagan cults.

 

[The Liturgist]

If all else fails, just Gas Light and Lie Right ?

Nothing our friend @Hans Blaster said in the post you replied to was a lie. Even if he was wrong about the science, or made a mistake in his calculations, and he is not wrong in claiming the Earth is spherical, he is not lying, because lying requires an intentional act of deception.

Indeed you do realize that falsely accusing someone of dishonesty is itself regarded as misconduct according to Scripture? Surely someone who places an Orthodox icon in their signature ought to follow the basic instruction of “Judge not, lest ye not be judged”?

By the way, are you an Orthodox Christian or are you just using one of our icons because it appears to agree with your position? I say appears because the fact is, Orthodox icons are not intended to depict the world in a physically accurate manner. They are rather intentionally stylized, as they are supposed to depict spiritual realities. That is why you have an icon showing a flat world with Hell opened up as a chasm beneath, because this is a metaphor for our spiritual condition but not a literal description of reality, any more than the three angels depicted in St. Andrei Rublev’s icon The Holy Trinity are intended to be actual renditions of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Lastly, are you aware of the real damage that you counter-factual claims are doing in terms of evangelism? Every Christian who makes an argument in favor of something demonstrably false, like the flat Earth, emboldens the conviction of those outside the Church that our religion is false and superstitious, especially when someone seeks to present the idea of a Flat Earth as though it were Christian doctrine, which it is assuredly not.

 

[The Liturgist]

Where did I lie?

You didn’t; much less did you gaslight. It is an absurd accusation. Also in my previous post I forgot to mention to your accuser that the act of telling someone their statements are untruthful can itself be used as a form of gaslighting, in that it represents a challenge to the presumptive fidelity of our perception of reality, which is intrinsic to the idea of gaslighting.

Essentially gaslighting can, as i am sure you are aware, and thus I write this not for your benefit but rather as an explanation for other readers, be defined as an abuse process wherein, through various deceipts and manipulations, someone is provoked into questioning and eventually into not trusting their own perception of reality, believing their natural senses and their memory to be untrustworthy. Thus it represents an extremely potent manipulative tool.

By the way, before the verb attained its current level of popularity I did have the pleasure of viewing the classic 1944 film Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman, and I very highly recommend it, especially if one enjoys classic cinema. I particularly liked John Cotten’s performance in it (I am somewhat of a fan of his). In general I really like movies from the 1940s; they tended to be spectacularly good, particularly when one considers that for much of the decade the worst war in human history thus far was raging. My favorite period is probably a combination of the era of the epic films from the 1950s into the early 1970s and the overlapping period of the early works of various auteur directors who are still with us, such as the dozen or so incredibly talented directors closely acquainted with Francis Ford Coppola. However the 1940s directly enabled that, and also gave us its own spectacular films with a distinct flavor, for example, the “Film Noir” cinema such as the classic Dark Passage with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

We may disagree on religion, but we clearly agree on science, and perhaps we might also share other interests like the cinema or the arts.

 

[Estrid]

And yet there are observations that show otherwise. And those observations allowed us to land on the moon and send robots to Mars and probes to the outer planets.

I think I will trust my eyes on this one.

More than you trust anyones claimed
ability at infallible Bible readin'?

 

[Lost4words]

Flay earthers interpret the Bible wrongly to claim the earth is flat, that the moon has its own light source....

 

[HantsUK]

Flay earthers interpret the Bible wrongly to claim the earth is flat, that the moon has its own light source....

They also interpret a flat earth wrongly, making claims that are impossible on a flat earth.

 

[Paulos23]

More than you trust anyones claimed
ability at infallible Bible readin'?

Yes. I trust my wife on that more than anyone else. And she went to school to learn it.

 

[jayem]

It's amazing that flat earth threads are still around. What's the point in arguing about it? True flat earth believers will never change their minds. I'm not a religious person, but I'll credit the Bible with some good advice on these kinds of discussions:

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him."
Proverbs 26:4

 

[The Liturgist]

It's amazing that flat earth threads are still around. What's the point in arguing about it? True flat earth believers will never change their minds. I'm not a religious person, but I'll credit the Bible with some good advice on these kinds of discussions:

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him."
Proverbs 26:4

I’m not trying to change the mind of Flat Earthers, rather, I am trying to make sure it is understood by non-Christian members such as yourself that the vast majority of Christians do not believe that. Do we believe that Jesus Christ is God incarnate and rose from the dead? Absolutely. But we don’t believe the world is flat. Indeed I know of no denomination that actually teaches that.

On the other hand, Muhammed actually did teach the world was flat. Indeed there is a Hadith in which he claimed that ships passing over the horizon was an optical illusion. And then there is the wacky bit in the Quran where Alexander the Great travels to the far west and finds the sun in its resting place, and if I recall he has a conversation with it. Fortunately for the safety of passengers on airlines like Emirates, Etihad and Qatar, most Muslims are somehow able to ignore those texts, although perhaps they do explain why despite the immense skill that Arabic navigators and shipbuilders existed, it was Christopher Columbus, using a ship design that originated in the Middle East, who sailed across the Atlantic, in the hopes of finding a shorter route to India. For the Muslims this possibility might not have occurred to them despite the fact they clearly had the technology (especially given that Leif Ericsson was able to do it in the harsh North Atlantic using Viking longboats which were vastly inferior to Arab sailing vessels).

 

[Estrid]

It's amazing that flat earth threads are still around. What's the point in arguing about it? True flat earth believers will never change their minds. I'm not a religious person, but I'll credit the Bible with some good advice on these kinds of discussions:

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him."
Proverbs 26:4

So steer clear of debate threads.

For me, observing such as creationists is a study
in cultural anthropology

 

[The Liturgist]

So steer clear of debate threads.

For me, observing such as creationists is a study
in cultural anthropology

Forgive me, but the gap between is large between flat Earthers and creationists, which I am not, although there is a trivial metaphysical way to reconcile evolution and creation (which is simply to say that God instantiated the world with pre-evolved lifeforms), although I myself am proud of the fact that the idea of the Big Bang came from a Roman Catholic priest and the first to theorize about black holes was an 18th century Anglican priest. I do respect creationists however in that their movement represents a legitimate backlash against the misapplication of the concept of natural selection by the Eugenics movement. That said, the criminal misuse of science does not invalidate science, which is why I support nuclear power and oppose the use of nuclear weapons as they are presently deployed.

I also take exception to your engaging in this cultural anthropology on a Christian forum, as though the Flat Earth movement was some uniquely Christian issue, when in fact every Christian denomination I am aware of rejects the Flat Earth concept and on the other hand Islam actually teaches it. And there are plenty of Muslim creationists as well. Trying to teach evolution in Afghanistan is not advisable.

 

[JSRG]

It's amazing that flat earth threads are still around. What's the point in arguing about it? True flat earth believers will never change their minds. I'm not a religious person, but I'll credit the Bible with some good advice on these kinds of discussions:

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him."
Proverbs 26:4

It is true that, generally speaking, arguing with someone on the Internet is very unlikely to change their mind--I have had relatively few experiences where I argued with someone and the other person just straight up said "yep, you've convinced me I was wrong and you were right." I am, for the record, not counting simple cases of factual correction, in which people are far more likely to accept it.

However, there are other people who may be observing the argument who could be persuaded. Many times, the purpose of answering people's arguments in a public forum (Internet or otherwise) is not to convince them, but to convince anyone who is observing the argument.