By "ancient", I'm mostly referring to people around the time of ancient Greece, give or take a thousand years or so.
Eratosthenes very famously estimated the Earth's circumference to a very accurately by measuring the difference in shadows in Alexandria and Syene, and this was around 240 BC. It's also well-known that mariners understood that the top of a ship's sails could be seen on the horizon before the ship itself could be seen, indicating the world is round.
My question is were things like this well-enough understood by common people across the ancient world to where most people knew the Earth was round, or were these just things that were understood by the scientific elite at the time but not widely-held opinions?
The reason I ask is because just looking up at the shape of the moon or sun seems like it would be enough proof that the Earth is round, but perhaps I am taking for granted what I already know and not appreciating potential ambiguity from the fact that these shapes, although visible, would nevertheless appear as 2D shapes.
This is by no means directed solely at Christians. I am including belief in reincarnation (particularly those of New Age spiritualism), ghosts, psychic mediums who communicate with the dead, etc.
I know this probably comes off as me trying to be edgy or controversial, but bear with me a second. It’s a bit of an old chestnut at this point, but the way that belief in spirits/souls distances people from the real, physical world seems to me unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst. Maybe that distance is a necessary coping mechanism for many people to exist in a universe that is random and dangerous, but it also enables people to retreat away from the physical world as something that is inconsequential (or, at the very least, secondary), just a temporary moment in our infinite existence. The irony here is that our desire to escape from the cruel indifference of reality creates new problems for us (religious conflict, anyone?), and blinds us to the possibility of collective solutions that could make the physical world a safer, less random place.
I compare belief in souls to belief in a flat earth or a geocentric universe because, in my view, they are all intuitive beliefs that have ultimately been disproven by scientific inquiry. To someone that doesn’t know any better, it seems like the sun moves around the earth. It seems that the earth is flat when you’re standing on the ground. It seems that humans have souls because we have internal mental experience, and we want/need to make some sort of sense of that experience. I also compare belief in souls to these beliefs, in particular, because while flat earthers are widely mocked and there is little to no discussion of a geocentric universe, ask any ten people you know and I’m positive at least a few of them believe in souls. Probably a majority. And here we find another irony, because while flat earthers are no doubt stupid, they haven’t really ever hurt anyone. We know that belief in eternal souls and the places they go to, on the other hand, have been at least partly responsible for a lot of terrible acts in our species’s history.
So, yeah, convince me that belief in souls is not just a form of denial to cope with our mortality—one that ultimately creates more problems than it solves. Or, at least, explain to me why people are so reluctant to give up the ghost in the shell, so to speak (I couldn’t help myself).
There was this one time in class where we were talking about Greek mythology, and then a Muslim student asked in a mocking tone "Do people still believe in this stuff?"
The irony was flabbergasting. I didn't think too much about it at the time because back then I still had respect for religion, but now it really bothers me. To be fair I guess it isn't completely hypocritical since a lot of the Muslim students in my class believed that the Quran had a ton of evidence, which is wrong But at least they aren't completely throwing logic and reason out the window.
But the thing is these people will mock stuff like giant spaghetti monster in the sky but it's just the same thing as religion. An unsubstantiated belief of a higher being. But this seemingly never comes to mind for them. Then they have the audacity to say that other religions are bullshit? I guess you could try to come up with a reason why the other stuff isn't hypocrisy, but that last one is unjustifiable.
I want to know what goes through these people's heads when they say stuff like this. Like come on, if you are religious then you can't say that other religions are wrong because what makes you think your one is right?
I've been wondering if it started as just a joke or a troll and some people believed it?
... or will the simple act of us discussing this make more of them?
So im just here to ask this question bc im really interested what u say about this. I always watch these videos on youtube about people saying the earth is flat and then I think...ok and now? There is literally no benefits for NASA or anyone else to say the earth is round when its not. BC NO ONE CARES. If the earth was flat the we had the same life as before and vice versa.
• Judge Beryl Howell continues to rip into the Capitol Insurrectionists and their lame excuses. She is one of the judges consistently refusing to believe the new-found contrition of these thugs.
>U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, the chief federal jurist for the District of Columbia, responded incredulously to one defense attorney who said his client believed Trump requested his unlawful conduct. She said if a president could authorize overturning an election he would be no different from “a king or a dictator,” and “that is not how we operate here.”
>When the attorney added that the man, the accused leader of a Proud Boys group, had been “chastened rather than emboldened” by the federal charges and that his anti-government “fever has broken,” Howell clapped back.
>“Essentially, that’s what your argument is, saying, ‘Whoops,’ now?” Howell asked. “Has he expressed any remorse or rejection of his membership in the Proud Boys, a gang of nationalist individuals? Does he reject the fantasy the election was stolen? Does he regret the positions that animated the mob on January 6th? Is there anything on the record about any of those things?”
>In the QAnon case, Howell rejected an attorney’s explanation that when his client shouted “Kill them all!” in the Capitol — referring to lawmakers — he did not mean he would do so personally, but that he believed lawmakers would be executed by proper authorities in a Judgment Day apocalypse.
>“QAnon believers will confront facts and reality in court,” she said. “What happened January 6th is no fantasy for people inside the Capitol or for people in the country. The defendant is entitled to his beliefs. He can believe the QAnon theory. He can believe the earth is flat. He can believe what he wants, but he is not entitled to break the law.”
>Judges have yet to rule on Pezzola and Watkins’s bids for release. But Howell rejected an argument by attorneys for accused Kansas City Proud Boy William Chrestman that his conduct at the Capitol was authorized by the president.
>“President Trump . . . for four years bragged that if he murdered someone on Fifth Avenue, his followers would still follow him,” she said, adding, “So if President Trump instructed members of the Proud Boys gang to murder somebody, and they did, that would be a legal excuse and immunize them from any liability for a criminal act?”
• Great story [here.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/capitol-riot-defendants-regrets/202
... keep reading on reddit ➡Critical thinking is like picking fruit from weed grass - it's certainly not like avoid fruit because grass is too big .
Be an ocean of mercy
A flaternity.
In Antiquities of the Jews Book 1, on the creation of heaven and earth, Josephus speaks of a crystalline firmament and seas round the earth, in keeping with Greek cosmology, yet the NT maintains a flat earth cosmology (i.e. Matt. 4:8, Luke 11:31, Rev. 1:7, 7:1). Both were presumably written by Hellenized Jews, both groups of writers had been exposed to Greek cosmology, so why the differences in cosmological beliefs?
Just wanted to make sure we all have the same answer in case someone asks me.
