Lets set aside for a moment that the flat earth movement is actually a religious movement disguised as science-based.
FE videos might be removed because they explicitly promote falsehoods as fact. By that standard, religious videos would be similar.
FE videos might be removed because they explicitly promote falsehoods as fact. By that standard, religious videos would be similar.
You have to be careful here, because you cannot prove God isn't real or that a religion is false.
You can prove the earth is not flat, however.
The certitude one can achieve through evidence for (or against) the claim that the Earth is presently flat, can never be obtained for an assertion regarding a past event.
You're mixing apples and oranges.
So I would argue that you can prove a religion is false/incorrect by comparing the claims of it's holy book to the available historical records. If they don't match, I think we can agree that at least one set is false.
Most of religion is in the interpretation of that religion's holy literature. Interpretations can and do change, and not everything is as clear as one might think.
Famously, in Christianity, God made Earth in 6 days, and rested on the 7th. What is a day? Is it an Earth day, ie. 24 hours? What if this God wasn't from Earth and doesn't experience time the same way humans do? Perhaps this God was from Venus, and experienced 6 days of 2802 Earth hours.
World wide flooding can be explained with localized floods based on knowledge of the explored world at the time the writing was done. Same with most writing from those times.
Lastly, most modern interpretations of holy literature don't claim everything in the text is fact or historical, but rather it has a mix of historical events and stories which promote religious principles.
Then why is it stated that the Earth was created in 6 days? To confuse us?
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/bibli...
My favorite, by Michael Shermer ( https://michaelshermer.com/articles/genesis-revisited/):
In the beginning — specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon — out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers appear to be more than 4,004 light years from Earth. In fact, some of the fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, so He created “tired light” — light that slows down through space — so that the 4004 B.C. creation myth might be preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors, including Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Nova and Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing (can God make a planet so big that he could not lift it?), He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants. And in the land God placed fossil fuels, natural gas, and other natural resources for humans to exploit, but not until after Day Six. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
And God saw that the land was lonely, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the land’s strata, fossils that appeared older than 4004 B.C. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals he would create later that day. Since this caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt God brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” — Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.
And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve, who were anatomically fully modern humans. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in chapter one He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in chapter two He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused further confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created Bible scholars and theologians to argue the point.
And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One he chose as his special creation He named Lucy. And God realized this was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to sort it out. And just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants who lived as farmers and herders would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory, so He created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the land that God realized this too was confusing, so he created anthropologists, folklorists, and mythologists to settle the issue.
By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.
Which mainstream religion claims the Bible is 100% historical fact? I ask because I'm interested in your definition of "mainstream" and "100%."
When I google, I find various resources from Catholic and Evangelical groups that say the Bible is 100% true.
You mention "Catholic," but there are lots of different types of Catholics. If you mean "Roman Catholic," you are incorrect in believing that it teaches the Bible is 100% fact.
Same with "Evangelical." There must be thousands of different evangelical religions. Please name the mainstream one that teaches that the Bible is 100% fact.
As stated previously, I think it will be interesting to find out what is meant by "mainstream."
https://web.archive.org/web/20061115025545/http://www.spurge...
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was formulated by more than 200 evangelical leaders at a conference convened by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy[1] and held in Chicago in October 1978. The statement was designed to defend the position of biblical inerrancy against a trend toward liberal conceptions of Scripture....
[T]he December 1986 conference adopted the Chicago Statement on Biblical Application....
Signatories to the statement came from a variety of evangelical Christian denominations, and included Robert Preus, James Montgomery Boice, Kenneth Kantzer, J. I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, R. C. Sproul and John F. MacArthur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Statement_on_Biblical_...
Notable signatories are listed at the Wikipedia article.
Or, put another way, the pure idea of God is not falsifiable. The Christian God however, might well be.
What's the difference between "God" and "a specific God"?
If you offer a definition or description of God, I will give it a shot.
Interpreting/expanding what you wrote, I think you're saying that God is:
* something that currently lives, or maybe lived in the past ("being"),
* that is not limited in any way ("all-powerful"),
* that created, from nothing, everything other than themself that has ever existed and that will exist in the future ("the universe")
Is that close?
Flat eartherism is probably 99% trolls masquerading as a movement.
At least on YouTube, the main channels seem to put up exclusively pseudoscience. I didn't know how religious the movement was until I saw "Behind the Curve" from HBO.
I mean, there's contrarians, who believe all sorts of weird things just because they like the satisfaction of being proven right (which means they tend to only believe things that it seems like some fringe has evidence for somewhere.)
But other than them, if you're taking a heterodox position on something, it tends to be because it confirms or fits in better with the rest of your existing world-view in some way.
And in what world-view, does hypothesizing the Earth to be flat make things you already believe make more sense? A Creationist one.
The best I've found:
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers
Or:
He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing
--
Funnily enough, Big Bang started as a Christian theory
I don't think that's completely accurate, but it would be fair to say that resistance to the Big Bang theory was exacerbated by anti-religious sentiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Bi...
For the fantastical accomplishments of people of thousands of years ago to be believed, there needs to be more concrete evidence than stories passed down for generations. In this situation, it's unlikely that such evidence survived, so the best we could do is replicate what happened in the past and determine whether or not such an accomplishment could have happened given the technology of the past.
I believe that people 5000 years ago could build awe-inspiring structures from stone because there's plenty of evidence of such capabilities (i.e., the great pyramids). I don't believe that someone turned water into wine instantly, because, afaik that is not possible, thus, at best, the event in question was some sleight-of-hand magic trick.
That’s only to say you have a more fundamental disagreement than the truth about this one incident.
In which religion does a baby turn water into wine? There's no babies doing that in the Bible.