[_ Old Earth _] Where Did the Idea of a Flat Earth Originate?

[Jacks Bratt]

And just why should such a challenge exclude the use of NASA or the military? Because flat earthers likely tend to be conspiracy theorists. People have flown around the world and others have sailed. When one is high enough in an airplane one can see the curvature.

There is zero reason to dismiss NASA and the military as it would require a conspiracy of massive proportions that would be utterly impossible to keep quiet. As for those who use the Bible, they will use God sitting above the "circle of the earth" and conclude that the earth is a flat circle, all the while ignoring Rev.7:1 where there are "angels standing at the four corners of the earth," or vice versa. Circles didn't have corners the last time I took math, but perhaps that was NASA based math.

The whole idea of a flat earth is just silly.

Why would you believe them, is a better question...
Let's look at the images of earth, that we have from our only source....NASA..

Apollo 17, 1975. The most popular image and used in every textbook.

Now, lets look at some more:

Check out the scale of the continents. They are all over the map, pardon the pun...some are huge others smaller.
In one image they have found that cloud formations are photo shopped and pasted all over the CGI image. One cloud formation found in many places on the globe in the same picture.

Also, NASA admits that they are not real photos but "composites" photos.
The Apollo 17 picture of the earth, from the moon, is photo shopped into the image.
Videos of the earth, from space, over a 24 hour period, show absolutely no cloud movement.
There is a short movie of the crew on one of the Apollo missions as they photograph the earth out their round window to make it look like a ball earth.

OK, let's ask the big question. NASA spent billions upon billions of dollars on this program. Out of all the times they went to the moon, they have ONE picture. If I went to the moon I would take many pictures.

So, no, I do not trust NASA. Not when they photo shop the earth into a moon shot picture and photo shop clouds onto a supposed picture of the globe and they cannot even show us multiple pictures of the globe earth, from space where the continents are at least the same size.

I don't know what they are doing, but it is not trust worthy.

If you want to see the photoshop of the earth in the picture taken from the moon, you can do it yourself, if you have photoshop. Rob Skiba, shows how he did it in this youtube clip...he also explains what I have been talking about here too.

 

[Jacks Bratt]

People have flown around the world and others have sailed. When one is high enough in an airplane one can see the curvature.

Actually, you can sail and fly around a flat earth....again, you need to look at their models.
Also, when you go on your next flight at 30,000 feet, hold the edge of a magazine up to the horizon... it's not curved. We believe and have been taught that it is a globe and we "see" the curve. Meanwhile, you cannot see the curve at that altitude. https://www.howitworksdaily.com/10-incredible-space-robots/

According to optical researchers, while we can fool ourselves into thinking we see the curvature of the Earth from high mountains, this is usually wishful thinking.You should be able to detect it from an aeroplane at a cruising height of around 10,600 metres (35,000 feet), but you need a fairly wide field of view (ie 60 degrees) and a virtually cloud-free horizon. The reality is that clouds, hills and mountains mean we rarely get to see the kind of perfectly flat horizon where the curve would be most obvious.

There is zero reason to dismiss NASA and the military as it would require a conspiracy of massive proportions that would be utterly impossible to keep quiet.

This isn't as difficult as one would believe. However, it is a common reason for saying it's not possible. NASA is compartmentalized. You only know your job and what you are doing. People may be threatened with the lives of their families or even their own life.

 

[Jacks Bratt]

As for those who use the Bible, they will use God sitting above the "circle of the earth" and conclude that the earth is a flat circle, all the while ignoring Rev.7:1 where there are "angels standing at the four corners of the earth," or vice versa. Circles didn't have corners the last time I took math, but perhaps that was NASA based math.

Here are some verses that would lead me to believe that it is flat. The scriptures are the one thing that trouble me. If read and comprehended as written, the bible describes a flat earth.

1 Chronicles 16:30: “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable.”
Psalm 93:1: “Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm ...”
Isaiah 45:18: “...who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast...”
Psalm 96:10: “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable ...”
Psalm 104:5: “Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken.”
In Daniel, the king “saw a tree of great height at the center of the earth...reaching with its top to the sky and visible to the earth's farthest bounds.” If the earth were flat, a sufficiently tall tree would be visible to “the earth's farthest bounds,” but this is impossible on a spherical earth.

You say that a circle has no corners, "last time I took math". Did a ball have four corners? "last time you took math"?

The whole idea of a flat earth is just silly.

It may be silly. I still have some questions about some things that won't allow me to state that the earth is flat. However, the Bible does describe a round flat earth and there are a few other things that I cannot explain with a globe earth.

Did you know that the Panama Canal was designed from one end to the other without one sniff of a calculation that allowed for or considered a curved, globe earth? Think about that. Water always holds it's own level. By the globe earth calculations, the curve is 8 inches for every mile of the earths surface. That means the first mile curves down from your view by 8 inches, the next is 32, after 5 miles it is 16 feet. Or, by math 8 inches per mile squared. That is no small curve, when you put it that way.Think of it. A lake, five miles long should curve 16 feet. I grew up on a lake that is at least 11 miles long and I can see an island that is more than five miles away and I can see it's shoreline.

At this rate, railways and long bridges and canals should be concerned and use this as a factor in their engineering. Yet, they never do.

 

[jasonc]

immovable implies well aren't able to remove hills, mountains.

 

[JohnDB]

Then someone needs to explain why toilets below the equator flush backwards in a counter clockwise fashion.

 

[jasonc]

Then someone needs to explain why toilets below the equator flush backwards in a counter clockwise fashion.

Or how maps and surveyors rely on the accuracy of compasses and use a gm angle to know where to set courses and markers.a compass points to magnetic north .a map has a distorton and when you plot courses.

 

[Barbarian]

.He observed the length of shadow cast in Alexandria (Egypt) and that no shadow was cast near Aswan (Egypt) on the summer solstice.
Again, a test that is dependent only on the angle of the suns rays. It would work equally well on a flat or globe earth...

It would if the Sun was a lot closer than it is. Say, if it was maybe 100 miles away, it would have produced something like that. But since the time of Aristarchus, it was known that the Sun was extremely distant. He lacked precise instruments to say how far, but he was able to say that the Sun was certainly much larger than the Peloponnese. That being so, Eratosthenes knew that the light rays from the Sun, striking the Earth were effectively parallel.

 

[Barbarian]

Then someone needs to explain why toilets below the equator flush backwards in a counter clockwise fashion.

Actually, they don't. The Coriolis effect requires more time and distance to work. However, the motion of tropical cyclones does show the effect you're thinking of, as does the operation of a Foucault pendulum. Neither of these would work that way on a flat Earth.

 

[Barbarian]

It may be silly. I still have some questions about some things that won't allow me to state that the earth is flat. However, the Bible does describe a round flat earth

I think it's a combination of figurative writing,and some left over from the time before the Israelites knew the Earth was round. The Hebrew word for the firmament, raqa, implies something beaten out like a sheet of metal. The idea was a dome over a flat Earth, with water above it.

We still talk about the "ends of the Earth", when we know that there is no such thing. It's not a problem, unless you want to argue that the Bible never uses figurative language, or is perfectly true even in things that are not inspired by God.

 

[Jacks Bratt]

Then someone needs to explain why toilets below the equator flush backwards in a counter clockwise fashion.

Actually, they don't. The Coriolis effect doesn't effect sinks and toilets as they are too small of a body of water.

Claim: The Coriolis force influences which direction water spirals down drains and toilets in different hemispheres.

Status: False.


from http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.asp

 

[Jacks Bratt]

immovable implies well aren't able to remove hills, mountains.

Actually, we move hills and create them. We even make Islands in the oceans. Tunnel through mountains. We have trucks called "earth movers"

Just another scripture that people will not believe. But, will twist it so they can sleep at night with no contradictions of science, observations and biblical scripture.

 

[JohnDB]

Actually, they don't. The Coriolis effect doesn't effect sinks and toilets as they are too small of a body of water.

Claim: The Coriolis force influences which direction water spirals down drains and toilets in different hemispheres.

Status: False.


from http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.asp

Can't help snopes...I know what I saw. I was well below the equator in Brazil on the Paraguay and Bolivian border. It went backwards.

 

[jasonc]

Actually, we move hills and create them. We even make Islands in the oceans. Tunnel through mountains. We have trucks called "earth movers"

Just another scripture that people will not believe. But, will twist it so they can sleep at night with no contradictions of science, observations and biblical scripture.

Care to deal with the problem of dead reckoning since maps are flat and the use of compass isn't based on that?

 

[Jacks Bratt]

Can't help snopes...I know what I saw. I was well below the equator in Brazil on the Paraguay and Bolivian border. It went backwards.

I don't doubt that. Thing is, it can go either way. When I was in school, a science teacher tried an experiment. Since we didn't know what we were actually testing, we were grade six, we all went home, filled a sink with water, put a little item in the water that would float, pulled the plug and came back to school the next day to report which way our sinks whirlpool rotated.
The teacher didn't expect the results he got as after we reported our findings and he put it in a chart, there was no way to say that water only went clockwise in this hemisphere. He didn't continue the lesson. We were all wondering why he just left it at that. No explanation as to why he had us do it.....I asked my father when I got home, what he thought the teacher was trying to do. My father explained what the experiment was supposed to show and why it failed.

The teacher should have explained. However, probably would have got into hot water if he told a bunch of students that we just disproved a common belief.

My father, a relatively uneducated man (grade 10) was very intelligent and knew why it didn't show what the teacher was trying to prove. This is when I started to learn that you should not take everything you are taught as FACT until you can prove it for yourself or gather enough observation to justify the view.

Try it. Fill a sink. Pull the plug, give a gentle swirl either way and you can get the water to go in either direction.

I will not say you didn't see it. I'm saying that the body of water has to be big in order to be affected enough to show Coriolis effect. Even then, given the contour of the bottom of the vessel, pond, river, pool, dam, either direction is possible.

 

[Jacks Bratt]

Care to deal with the problem of dead reckoning since maps are flat and the use of compass isn't based on that?

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. I'm not too familiar with dead reckoning, however I do believe that errors can occur do to accumulation of errors from previous steps and not knowing the exact speed at all times or the exact distance traveled at all times.

Not sure what this would have to do with the earth being a globe or flat.. maybe someone who is familiar with this could comment?

 

[Free]

Actually, you can sail and fly around a flat earth....again, you need to look at their models.
Also, when you go on your next flight at 30,000 feet, hold the edge of a magazine up to the horizon... it's not curved. We believe and have been taught that it is a globe and we "see" the curve. Meanwhile, you cannot see the curve at that altitude. https://www.howitworksdaily.com/10-incredible-space-robots/

According to optical researchers, while we can fool ourselves into thinking we see the curvature of the Earth from high mountains, this is usually wishful thinking.You should be able to detect it from an aeroplane at a cruising height of around 10,600 metres (35,000 feet), but you need a fairly wide field of view (ie 60 degrees) and a virtually cloud-free horizon. The reality is that clouds, hills and mountains mean we rarely get to see the kind of perfectly flat horizon where the curve would be most obvious.


This isn't as difficult as one would believe. However, it is a common reason for saying it's not possible. NASA is compartmentalized. You only know your job and what you are doing. People may be threatened with the lives of their families or even their own life.

I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but such a conspiracy would extend far beyond just NASA and the military. You would have to include all sorts of scientists, engineers, pilots, boat captains, etc.; a significantly large number of people, both in the public and private sectors, on several continents, and within different governments. It would be absolutely impossible to contain. It's utter nonsense.

And then there is the question of Why? What in the world would NASA have to gain by trying to convince people the earth is a sphere if it wasn't? Why spend what would amount to trillions (to keep people quiet) for something that isn't true?

 

[JohnDB]

I don't doubt that. Thing is, it can go either way. When I was in school, a science teacher tried an experiment. Since we didn't know what we were actually testing, we were grade six, we all went home, filled a sink with water, put a little item in the water that would float, pulled the plug and came back to school the next day to report which way our sinks whirlpool rotated.
The teacher didn't expect the results he got as after we reported our findings and he put it in a chart, there was no way to say that water only went clockwise in this hemisphere. He didn't continue the lesson. We were all wondering why he just left it at that. No explanation as to why he had us do it.....I asked my father when I got home, what he thought the teacher was trying to do. My father explained what the experiment was supposed to show and why it failed.

The teacher should have explained. However, probably would have got into hot water if he told a bunch of students that we just disproved a common belief.

My father, a relatively uneducated man (grade 10) was very intelligent and knew why it didn't show what the teacher was trying to prove. This is when I started to learn that you should not take everything you are taught as FACT until you can prove it for yourself or gather enough observation to justify the view.

Try it. Fill a sink. Pull the plug, give a gentle swirl either way and you can get the water to go in either direction.

I will not say you didn't see it. I'm saying that the body of water has to be big in order to be affected enough to show Coriolis effect. Even then, given the contour of the bottom of the vessel, pond, river, pool, dam, either direction is possible.

Oh I'm sure that it can go both ways...but in the Southern hemisphere it goes better counterclockwise than clockwise. And vice versa in the northern hemisphere.

 

[Free]

Here are some verses that would lead me to believe that it is flat. The scriptures are the one thing that trouble me. If read and comprehended as written, the bible describes a flat earth.

1 Chronicles 16:30: “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable.”
Psalm 93:1: “Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm ...”
Isaiah 45:18: “...who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast...”
Psalm 96:10: “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable ...”
Psalm 104:5: “Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken.”
In Daniel, the king “saw a tree of great height at the center of the earth...reaching with its top to the sky and visible to the earth's farthest bounds.” If the earth were flat, a sufficiently tall tree would be visible to “the earth's farthest bounds,” but this is impossible on a spherical earth.

Those don't suggest the earth is flat, only that it does't move. But that too is nonsense. And to appeal to a king's dream in Daniel...

You say that a circle has no corners, "last time I took math". Did a ball have four corners? "last time you took math"?

Of course a ball doesn't have corners, that is rather my point. People who use the Bible to suggest the earth is flat or that it is the centre of the universe fail to understand the purpose of such language, that there are things such as figures of speech and poetry. The appeal to the king's dream in Daniel is a perfect example.

However, the Bible does describe a round flat earth and there are a few other things that I cannot explain with a globe earth.

The Bible doesn't really describe the earth. As my previous post pointed out, if one wants to take certain verses as showing the earth is round and flat, one must also take into account verses that show it is rectangular and flat. But that is contradictory--something cannot be both a circle and a rectangle; it is one or the other.

Did you know that the Panama Canal was designed from one end to the other without one sniff of a calculation that allowed for or considered a curved, globe earth? Think about that. Water always holds it's own level. By the globe earth calculations, the curve is 8 inches for every mile of the earths surface. That means the first mile curves down from your view by 8 inches, the next is 32, after 5 miles it is 16 feet. Or, by math 8 inches per mile squared. That is no small curve, when you put it that way.Think of it. A lake, five miles long should curve 16 feet. I grew up on a lake that is at least 11 miles long and I can see an island that is more than five miles away and I can see it's shoreline.

At this rate, railways and long bridges and canals should be concerned and use this as a factor in their engineering. Yet, they never do.

If the earth curves 8" for every mile, then a five mile lake would curve 40" or 3' 4", not 16'. I would like to see the math that shows an 8" drop for every mile.

 

[Jacks Bratt]

Oh I'm sure that it can go both ways...but in the Southern hemisphere it goes better counterclockwise than clockwise. And vice versa in the northern hemisphere.

It may, in fact, go better. However, I have no way of proving it. I do know that up here, north of the 49th, it goes both ways with no real difficulty either way. This was demonstrated by my grade 6 class when I was much younger, and threw the teacher off his lesson as he had we had data that contradicted it.

 

[Jacks Bratt]

I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but such a conspiracy would extend far beyond just NASA and the military. You would have to include all sorts of scientists, engineers, pilots, boat captains, etc.; a significantly large number of people, both in the public and private sectors, on several continents, and within different governments. It would be absolutely impossible to contain. It's utter nonsense.

Really, I hope it's utter nonsense. What if it were true? Can you imagine the mayhem that this would cause? Maybe it is absolutely impossible to contain. Maybe, with new technology that is available to even civilians, it is getting harder to contain. Why is the flat earth topic exploding on the internet. Why are so many people being convinced.

And then there is the question of Why? What in the world would NASA have to gain by trying to convince people the earth is a sphere if it wasn't? Why spend what would amount to trillions (to keep people quiet) for something that isn't true?

If it is and NASA found out about it what kind of momentous lie would that be. Can you just imagine? NASA, after sending a manned rocket up to orbit the earth, finds out it's a flat earth after all...... How would you handle that? How would you break it to the world after 100's of years of being wrong? What would that say of our solar system, galaxy, theory of gravity? Just stop and think of that. It would cause anarchy.


You know, it's funny that you mention "boat captains". Years ago people made entries into their ship logs that don't fit the globe earth. Others wrote books, that today, we never hear about.

Think about it. If you were a person, in any profession, that afforded you the ability to observe and record proof of a flat earth, AND professed such a statement that the earth was flat.... what would be the consequence and outcome? What would become of your career? Life? Family?
If there are is such a grand conspiracy, it would be much easier, than people believe, to keep anyone who could "spill the beans" quiet.

There is a treaty that keeps anyone from going to a point south of a certain parallel. I forget which one. This treaty was signed in 1959 after Admiral Byrd took a huge military mission to the south pole. What they found was so important that they made this treaty. Now there are 53 countries who are part of it.
I find this odd. That this area was made such a protected place all of a sudden and still strictly protected today.

Check these out from times before we knew everything....http://modernflatearth.com/antarctica/

During Captain James Clark Ross’s voyages around the Antarctic circumference, he often wrote in his journal perplexed at how they routinely found themselves out of accordance with their charts, stating that they found themselves an average of 12-16 miles outside their reckoning every day, some days as much as 29 miles. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes commanded a United States Navy exploration expedition to the Antarctic from August 18th, 1838 to June 10th, 1842, almost four years spent “exploring and surveying the Southern ocean.” In his journals Lieutenant Wilkes also mentioned being consistently east of his reckoning, sometimes over 20 miles in less than 18 hours.

“The commanders of these various expeditions were, of course, with their education and belief in the earth’s rotundity, unable to conceive of any other cause for the differences between log and chronometer results than the existence of currents. But one simple fact is entirely fatal to such an explanation, viz., that when the route taken is east or west the same results are experienced. The water of the southern region cannot be running in two opposite directions at the same time; and hence, although various local and variable currents have been noticed, they cannot be shown to be the cause of the discrepancies so generally observed in high southern latitudes between time and log results

“In the southern hemisphere, navigators to India have often fancied themselves east of the Cape when still west, and have been driven ashore on the African coast, which, according to their reckoning, lay behind them. This misfortune happened to a fine frigate, the Challenger, in 1845. How came Her Majesty’s Ship ‘Conqueror,’ to be lost? How have so many other noble vessels, perfectly sound, perfectly manned, perfectly navigated, been wrecked in calm weather, not only in dark night, or in a fog, but in broad daylight and sunshine – in the former case upon the coasts, in the latter, upon sunken rocks – from being ‘out of reckoning,’ under circumstances which until now, have baffled every satisfactory explanation.” -Rev. Thomas Milner, “Tour Through Creation”

The “Australian Handbook, Almanack, Shippers’ and Importers’ Directory” states that the distance between Sydney and Nelson is 1400 nautical or 1633 statute miles. Allowing a more than sufficient 83 miles as the distance for rounding Cape Farewell and sailing up Tasman Bay to Nelson leaves 1550 statute miles as the straight-line distance from the meridian of Sydney to the meridian of Nelson. Their given difference in longitude is 22 degrees 2’14”. Therefore if 22 degrees 2’14” out of 360 is 1550 miles, the entirety measures 25,182 miles. This is larger than the Earth is said to be at the equator, and 4262 miles greater than it would be at Sydney’s southern latitude on a globe of said proportions! One 360th part of 25,182 gives 70 miles as the distance between each degree of longitude at Sydney’s 34 degree Southern latitude. On a globe 25,000 miles in equatorial circumference, however, degrees of longitude at 34 degrees latitude would be only 58 miles, a full 12 miles per degree less than reality. This perfectly explains why Ross and other navigators in the deep South experienced 12+ mile daily discrepancies between their reckoning and reality, the farther South traveled the farther the divide.

“From near Cape Horn, Chile to Port Philip in Melbourne, Australia the distance is 9,000 miles. These two places are 143 degrees of longitude from each other. Therefore the whole extent of the Earth’s circumference is a mere arithmetical question. If 143 degrees make 9,000 miles, what will be the distance made by the whole 360 degrees into which the surface is divided? The answer is, 22,657 miles; or, 8357 miles more than the theory of rotundity would permit. It must be borne in mind, however, that the above distances are nautical measure, which, reduced to statute miles, gives the actual distance round the Southern region at a given latitude as 26,433 statute miles; or nearly 1,500 miles more than the largest circumference ever assigned to the Earth at the equator.” -Dr. Samuel Rowbotham, “Earth Not a Globe, 2nd Edition” (52)