On the myth of Christian belief in a flat earth: read this, then add it to your list of "Articles to send to people who persist in repeating ignorant declarations about Christian History."

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T17:53:11.965436+00:00

Fair enough - but generalizing from specific examples is a bad way to go no matter who is doing it.

BranderChatfield · 2012-05-25T17:49:33.224178+00:00

That was a really good summation.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T17:45:47.221571+00:00

Well, I'm not trying to advance it as an argument about my own homophobia or lack thereof - I was simply illustrating that not all congregations are like Westboro Baptist.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T17:44:38.467733+00:00

Again, I'm waiting for some citation that supports this claim.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T17:43:26.080983+00:00

I would agree - and so do most Christians. US fundamentalists make a lot of noise, but they represent a rather small minority of Christianity as a whole.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T17:23:47.833587+00:00

Skirted it? Why would I? The vast majority of the world's Christians believe in evolution. The largest denominations say they have no problem with it.

Again, you're taking the non-biblical beliefs of a small number of the world's Christians (namely US fundamentalists) and claiming that they somehow apply to all Christians, despite all evidence to the contrary.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T17:12:38.131877+00:00

I'm really not sure how any of that is relevant or how opposition to your civil rights is holding back science.

Yes, there are a lot of pig headed people out there. Blaming everything you don't like on "those people" is just another form of bigotry; don't fall into the same trap that the people you hate are in.

Edit: BTW, I wasn't going to use the "some of my best friends are gay" argument, but you might be encouraged to know that the current head of our board of deacons is a gay woman in a committed relationship. they even added a little rainbow to our sign out front to make sure people knew we were open to LGBT members.

porkchop_d_clown · 2012-05-25T16:45:26.531409+00:00

Not that cheap, really - because I'm heavy, the wheels were upgrades, I bent the stock ones out of true pretty quickly.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T16:39:31.516510+00:00

You're going to have to work hard to provide evidence of european scientists during the dark ages.

porkchop_d_clown · 2012-05-25T15:45:19.803370+00:00

I googled around and I found a guy who not only had the same problem, it looks like it might be the same wheel....

http://thedailyrandonneur.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/velocity-deep-v-cracked.jpg

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T15:31:03.285752+00:00

Wow! That only took roughly 400 years. You have to admit, Christianity is what prevented science from progressing for about 1000 years in the Dark Ages.

Ummm.... No, I don't. The Christian monasteries are the only reason Europe managed to retain any science whatsoever after the fall of the Roman Empire.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:59:29.540660+00:00

Okay. You might want to work on your presentation a bit, then. The reason people are voting you down isn't that they disbelieve what happened to Galileo - it's that your word choice makes it sound like you have a simplistic understanding of the affair.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:58:29.960204+00:00

Wow. Way to project, dude. I describe the way some people think and you push it off on me?

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:55:45.810828+00:00

He was sent to jail for heresy.

This is absolutely true. It is also true that that wasn't his real offense. His real crime was taking the pope's money and then making the pope look like an idiot. This pissed the pope off so much that he used what had handy to punish him: religious law.

That doesn't make it right that Galileo was punished, but it's also not a fair example of the Catholic's attitude towards science. Look up the list of Jesuit scientists on wikipedia, for example.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:52:48.825006+00:00

In what realm is it acceptable to blame people for the acts committed by their ancestors, centuries before?

Shall we continue to punish the germans for the crimes of their grand fathers?

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:50:19.671588+00:00

I agree with much of what you say - I spent the first 20 years of my life as a Catholic and left for similar issues but I wanted to highlight one issue:

I respect Mary, but I don't see why I need to her. Jesus said to use his name to communicate with God, because he sits in intercession for us.

and

Why should I pray to Thomas (or whomever is in charge of lost things) when I've lost my keys?

A lot of protestants get hung up on this issue (and they are both the same issue). Basically, the idea is similar to hiring a lawyer. Sure you can go straight to the judge, but why not ask for help from someone who knows the ropes?

For example, God is traditionally portrayed as a judgmental father, but Mary is a loving mother. It is no surprise to me at all that so many women find Mary much easier to "connect with" than Yehovah, while Marines go straight to their customized version of Psalm 23.

As long as the person praying doesn't slip into idolatry (confusing the saint with a god) I don't think it's a problem.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:44:07.750520+00:00

I do sometimes, when debating the authenticity of the bible, mention it's verses indicating a flat Earth.

The key thing when looking at verses like Isaiah, is that the Hebrews conceived of the "world" as extending from horizon to horizon. They didn't even understand the world was bigger than they could say.

Basically, reading the bible for cosmology is like reading Robert Frost for physics.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:37:10.123074+00:00

The hebrews were bronze age barbarians. They didn't even have a word for "sphere".

Moreover, you're talking about words written a good millennium before the concept of a spherical world began to spread.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:35:50.828951+00:00

You do realize that the Psalms are poems and songs, right?

I don't often listen to Beyonce for the latest arguments over cosmology.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:34:14.080679+00:00

I think the issue is that the Church decided to settle the matter via the Scriptures at all.

The problem is that Galileo was actually an employee of the church at the time, which brought him into the ecclesiastical government rather than the civil one.

The real issue behind all of this is that Galileo took the pope's money then wrote a book that deliberately and explicitly mocked him. This left the pope willing to dig up any excuse to get even.

Does that justify what happened? No, but it means that the situation was a lot more complicated than the way it is portrayed.

Real life rarely has the pure villains and heroes that we love so much.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:32:00.404046+00:00

Fundies believe that dark spirits use these to confuse people (or at least that is what my church told me).

I think that's pretty much correct. Even the Catholics didn't explicitly disbelieve in pagan gods - they argued that those gods were actually fallen angels setting themselves up as petty dictators.

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:30:44.836079+00:00

Ummm... that's a serious misstatement.

In 2000, JPII explicitly apologized over the Galileo affair.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/mar/13/catholicism.religion

In 1990, the current pope, then a bishop, defended Galileo

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/186421?eng=y

In 2011, the Vatican participated in the celebrations of Galileo's birth:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2011-04-15-vatican-galileo-honor.htm

DivineMaster · 2012-05-25T14:20:12.713052+00:00

This page says he argued simply that there was no evidence that there were people on the "other side" not that he believed the bible says there can't be people on the other side.

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