Who started the flat earth theory?

canada-man said:

is this true i found this on Christian website

What I've found in a comparatively short period of time was a man named Lactantius who lived from 245-325AD. He of course rejected all previous theories from both secular and religious leaders that the earth was a globe or spherical in shape. Later in life Lactantius converted to Catholicism and at first was considered a heretic by the Roman church. However, during the Renaissance the Vatican did in fact promote his findings as scientific fact and actually persecuted and killed anyone who said otherwise. Somehow Christopher Columbus, the lone believer in a spherical earth at the time who was ridiculed and threatened by the Pope of Rome, did in fact set sail to prove the earth was spherical in shape. His findings did openly embarrass and confirm the Pope to be as he is to this day.

http://www.remnantofgod.org/flatearth.htm

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P.S the flat eathy nonsense is filling up youtube videos

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Of course Columbus was fairly typical of many informed and thoughtful people of his time, if they bothered themselves with such matters. They all surmised the Earth was some sort of round thing, whether ball disc or bowl, and had since early Persian astronomers.

What energized him was the prospect of a shorter route to the East than sailing all the way around Africa and past India like the Portuguese, or overland via the Silk Road. What spoiled his plan was a honkin' great continent no one remembered from that last Ice Age.

Filling up YouTube videos? Surely you don't watch those things

canada-man said:

no they often show up in "related or recomend videos" while i am watching music videos

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I think no one will ever know who first said the Earth is flat. It's kind of a natural and unremarkable assumption if all you're doing is going about your day's business. Why even think about it?

My bet would be that it worked the other way around: Someone stared at something — a mountainous point of land jutting out to sea in the distance, and wondered why it got taller, revealing trees and shoreline as they got closer, and the "I got it! If the Earth was round, and the water curved …". Which would make her duller companions, who were busy watching for gophers they could catch, or fish they could spear, to denounce her as a dreamer, "…'cause we can all see it's flat, feed your kid and leave the world to us".

Lactantius was just an early Christian who wrote that sort of ideology-based 'thinking' down. His pagan predecessors' works were mostly burned, except in Muslim regions, but Wikipeda says they go back to 6th C BCE

Prior to the fifth century B.C. the prevalent theory was that earth was a disc floating on the ocean (which was itself a disk), however, between the fifth and second centuries B.C. the Greeks where able to determine by observation that the earth must be a sphere and indeed by 240 B.C. Eratosthenes had determined the circumference of the earth.

This knowledge was preserved in Western Europe through the Middle Ages and was most definitely known in the Byzantine Empire The idea that the Medieval World thought the Earth was flat was a myth built up in the mid-nineteenth century by the likes of Washington Irving, John Draper and Andrew White, who all used it to support the theory that that there was a long lasting and quintessential conflict between science and religion, which those like Columbus had struggled to overcome.

The beginning of the modern flat earth movement was Zetetic Astronomy a pamphlet published in 1849 and its follow-up The inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and its Opposition to the Scripture both by the Englishman Samuel Rowbotham. The errors he had made due to the effects of atmospheric refraction, were pointed out by Alfred Russel Wallace in the Bedford Level experiments in 1870. However, Rowbotham's bad science has lived on.

canada-man said:

is this true i found this on Christian website


What I've found in a comparatively short period of time was a man named Lactantius who lived from 245-325AD. He of course rejected all previous theories from both secular and religious leaders that the earth was a globe or spherical in shape. Later in life Lactantius converted to Catholicism and at first was considered a heretic by the Roman church. However, during the Renaissance the Vatican did in fact promote his findings as scientific fact and actually persecuted and killed anyone who said otherwise. Somehow Christopher Columbus, the lone believer in a spherical earth at the time who was ridiculed and threatened by the Pope of Rome, did in fact set sail to prove the earth was spherical in shape. His findings did openly embarrass and confirm the Pope to be as he is to this day.

http://www.remnantofgod.org/flatearth.htm



P.S the flat eathy nonsense is filling up youtube videos

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WTF? A crazy kook theory that CanadaMan does NOT believe in????

The apocalypse must surely be near!

Aardvark154 said:

Prior to the fifth century B.C. the prevalent theory was that earth was a disc floating on the ocean (which was itself a disk), however, between the fifth and second centuries B.C. the Greeks where able to determine by observation that the earth must be a sphere and indeed by 240 B.C. Eratosthenes had determined the circumference of the earth.

This knowledge was preserved in Western Europe through the Middle Ages and was most definitely known in the Byzantine Empire The idea that the Medieval World thought the Earth was flat was a myth built up in the mid-nineteenth century by the likes of Washington Irving, John Draper and Andrew White, who all used it to support the theory that that there was a long lasting and quintessential conflict between science and religion, which those like Columbus had struggled to overcome.

The beginning of the modern flat earth movement was Zetetic Astronomy a pamphlet published in 1849 and its follow-up The inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and its Opposition to the Scripture both by the Englishman Samuel Rowbotham. The errors he had made due to the effects of atmospheric refraction, were pointed out by Alfred Russel Wallace in the Bedford Level experiments in 1870. However, Rowbotham's bad science has lived on.

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Thanks Aardvark, I always appreciate the knowledge you bring to the table. I will stick to my sense that unnamed stone-agers, medieval peasants, New England mill-workers and average people in the street never much changed their thinking, if any, about the matter. The round-earthers have always been the minority who know better.

I think it's particularly useful in these times to recognize that possessing the real truth about our world has always been a minority thing and always will be. 'Elite' isn't just a word on special airport lounges and credit cards, it's an earned distinction acquired by study, observation and thought. The rest of us poor mortals do quite well on a daily basis imagining our driveways are as flat and as level as the Earth. Always have; always will. Even though the better informed can tell us to the micron how curved it must be, and actually is. Fine for them, "flat" works for us.

We make nothing but trouble every which way when we confuse 'elite' with something bad and undesirable. The word means they do know better. Just like Eratosthenes. Picking elites is what we're supposed to be doing when we get behind that voting screen. Isn't it wonderful how good we are at it?

Of course sailors for centuries have realized the earth is a sphere, when you drop things over the horizon and have them appear over the horizon. Most certainly when one circumnavigates the world and you end up where you started you realize it is a sphere and you also have the added thing of gaining or loosing a day depending upon your direction of travel.

canada-man said:

no they often show up in "related or recomend videos" while i am watching music videos

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Really says something about your youtube viewing history if they assume you want more crazy conspiracy junk.

Considering Eratosthenes did a fantastic job in calculating the Earth's diameter more than 2000 years ago...

Aardvark154 said:

Of course sailors for centuries have realized the earth is a sphere, when you drop things over the horizon and have them appear over the horizon. Most certainly when one circumnavigates the world and you end up where you started you realize it is a sphere and you also have the added thing of gaining or loosing a day depending upon your direction of travel.

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We should consider that first circumnavigation was in the dying years of western Europe's attachment to the old Julian calendar, and it was already weeks out of sync with the seasons. I suspect anyone aboard the Victoria or ashore who noted the date discrepancy at all probably discounted it as yet more evidence that 'someone aughta do something about calendars'. I'm equally sure some thoughtful person somewhere had already figured out that the sun couldn't rise at the same time everywhere on a spherical planet. But who cared, when all travel was at a foot pace?

canada-man said:

operation mockingbird, operation Northwoods NATO'a operation Gladio and similar clandestine operations are not conspiracy junk.

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As I said, your youtube viewing history must be quite interesting if they think you are interested in flat earth theories.