Not on ceremony, that’s for sure. It’s a very big turtle. It can stand anywhere it wants.
The old Babylonian view, according to the professor of one history of religions class that I took years ago, was that the universe was basically water. The waters were parted, with the flat world floating on the water below it and the firmament of the sky holding up the water above it. No turtles were involved.
If you read the Noah’s ark story, the firmament was opened to let in the rain from above, while the deeps of the earth were opened to allow more water in from below.
There were also the heavens above and the underworld below, but I’m not sure if they were closer to the earth, beyond the water, or metaphysical enough to be in the same place as the water without being in it.
Christine Garwood’s Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea - which appears to be just out in the US, having been published in the UK last year - provides a thorough and readable history of the subject. The early part is just a rehash of Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth, but she hits her stride with the 19th century re-invention of the idea under the title “zetetic astronomy”. That then provides a relatively stable, if obviously never numerically large, tradition through to Johnson and his International Flat Earth Research Society. The book’s rather valuable for the way it disentangles in detail who was serious and who was taking the piss amongst the various proponents in the second half of the 20th century.
It’s a fairly consistent feature of this zetetic tradition to picture the earth as a circular disc, centred on the North Pole and surrounded on the outside by a giant wall of ice in Antarctica. The Sun and Moon are permanently above this plane.
What’s underneath is, however, one of the issues where there wasn’t much agreement within the tradition, though it’s not one that the proponents argued about amongst themselves. The three main options have been:
[ul]It’s just rock, possibly with Hell down there somewhere.[/ul]
[ul]It’s water and that earth-disc is floating on an infinitely wide and deep, utterly flat ocean.[/ul]
[ul]It’s unknowable. No-one can cross the ice walls or dig deep enough to find out.[/ul]
A major exception was Samuel Shenton, the British believer who got a lot of press coverage in Sixties. He thought that the universe consisted of a infinitely wide flat plain of rock, but with deep pits down into it. The Earth was a disc floating on a pool of water at the bottom of one of those pits.
Garwood finishes her history with Johnson’s death in 2001. Though she estimates, without giving any reasoning, that there are probably at least still a few thousand “serious” believers in the idea out there.
The Great A’Tuin does not stand but, rather, swims.
Where does the Elephants myth come from (before Pratchett)?
Whether rightly or wrongly, 19th century westerners attributed it to Hindu cosmology. Henry David Thoreau from an essay published in 1862:
my father-in-law does not believe that the world is spherical. he also believes that they spoke king james-type english in bible times.
Well, he’s right, it isn’t. It’s an oblate spheroid. Sort of. The tidal bulge caused by the Moon kinda throw off the symmetry, but there you go.
i mean he’s a flat-earther. i was cooking him dinner a couple of weeks ago and he explained it to me. satan tempted jesus by taking him to a mountaintop and showing him all the kingdoms of the earth, and that is impossible if the world is spherical, and the bible is literally true, so the world must be flat.
It’s interesting how believers believe their God is bound by the limits of their imagination.
The Earth has a chronic equatorial bulge, which, tragically, nothing can be done about. This is called the “Fat Earth Theory”.
I think it’s more that the abilities of their God are limited by the bounds of their imaginations.
is it really necessary to insult believers? i’m one, and i don’t think god is confined to what i can imagine him doing.
Bonzer, you rule. Thank you so much for the info! This has been bothering for a while, but now I can sleep easy.
Much love and admiration!
I apologize, and my statement is incorrect anyway: Many believers believe in a deity or pantheon not bound by their own limits.
apology accepted. u shd be offering me some sort of gift as well, tho. flowers, rubies, the digits to ur swiss bank acct, or some such.
I’ll offer you a shift key, for starters. Worth more than those other trinkets to some of us.
psssst - offer some extra vowels too!
So what’s his take of the endless supply of pictures from various space agencies showing the earth’s spherical shape from space? Does he take the “global conspiracy” route? Also, has he never used a GPS system before? How such ignorance lives on in today’s world is simply astonishing to me. :smack:
You could fairly easily prove the earth is curved with careful measurement and some high school mathematics. The tentacles of this conspiracy are indeed insidious and far-reaching. Not only have they got to every astronaut, pilot, cartographer, navigator, GPS manufacturer and Rand McNally, but it looks like surveyors and high school math teachers are in on it too!