By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
FLAT earthism is a weird but perhaps understandable phenomenon in this day and age of rapid scientific and technological advance, spread of information and sceptism of official narratives.
This might be called neo-gnosticism, or a resurgence of a branch of belief known as gnosticism. The gnostics were 1st Century followers of ideas that challenged the orthodox Christianity as taught by the early church in St Paul’s epistles beginning around AD51-52.
The gnostics, with their mystical “special knowledge” around the Jesus Christ proclaimed by the apostles, were a forerunner of our modern-day “New Agers”. The gnostics developed what theologians define as the heresy of docetism, which taught that Christ only appeared to have a man’s body.
Today’s gnostics also have “special knowledge” concerning the nature of our cosmos. Bolstered by gigabytes of YouTube videos, they challenge the accepted and common view of Earth and other planets as spheres of various sizes floating in space and dominated by the Sun.
This scepticism of orthodox common beliefs is not without some justification, given the unanswered questions around the NASA moon landings, global warming, the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and a host of other manufactured events.
Without going down those rabbit holes, these events do pose serious unanswered questions. We are also led to believe such narratives are beyond debate and to question them makes one a tin-foil hat-wearing conspiracy kook.
The common response of those who become aware of the manipulation of public opinion by the all-encompassing modern media of news, TV and film is “question everything” or “don’t believe anything they say”. But that may be an overreaction when people begin to accuse NASA of “faking everything”, most notably their representations of the earth as a globe.
Prominent flat earther Eric Dubay maintains that our entire view of the cosmos, the planets and stars, has been corrupted by the idea of globes, a dogma promulgated by NASA. He claims planets, when captured by non-NASA amateur photography or telescopes, “look more like two dimensional lights”.
Today’s gnostics like to disassemble words. For instance, Dubay claims the word planet is simply “plane” with a t added by modern astronomers. He claims ancient people called the planets “wandering stars” because they move while other stars are fixed.
They also take the word “firmament” from the Hebrew “raquia” in Genesis to mean a fixed dome, while the “edge of the earth plane” is a massive ice wall, cleverly protected by the powers-that-be from photographers, explorers and aircraft too, somehow.
Putting aside these eye-rolling claims, can we go so far as to deny that NASA, the Russians and other nations with space programs, didn’t actually launch rockets and satellites into space with cameras that could capture the Earth from previously unexplored heights? Today, Elon Musk regularly sends rockets into space and brings them back in one piece.
Believe it or not, the first photo of the Earth from space was taken 78 years ago when a group of US military and scientists in the New Mexico desert launched a V-2 rocket carrying a 35-mm motion picture camera to a height 65 miles (105 km) above Earth’s surface. Apparently, those Nazi scientists were put to work very early in the aftermath of Operation Paperclip.
According to astronomer Deborah Byrd’s EarthSky.org, the online version of the long-running US radio program EarthSky, the rocket-borne camera snapped a new frame every 1.5 seconds on its vertical ascent, then fell back to Earth minutes later, hitting the ground at 500 ft per second. The camera itself was smashed, but the film, protected in a steel cassette, was unharmed.
Technically, those frames were the first photographs from space, although a photo taken from the Explorer II balloon, which ascended 13.7 miles in 1935, was high enough to discern the curvature of the Earth. The V-2 rocket photos certainly did the same, including those taken from V-2 No.21, launched on March 7, 1947. A quite clear black and white was taken at an altitude of 101 miles (162 km). The dark area on Earth at upper left is the Gulf of California.
But all of this recent history, according to the hyper-sceptical neo-gnostics, is probably fake news designed to mislead the innocent populace who apparently needed to believe the earth was a globe, perhaps as part of the big globalist brainwashing operation beginning with the UN – whose symbol is a globe! Get it?
We should also point out that these shots of Earth from space were before computer generated images (CGI). The flat earthers claim the NASA shots of the Earth and other planets (sorry, planes) are CGI manipulated.
But contrary to popular belief, the idea of our planet being a globe floating in space was accepted by Greek philosophers by the 5th Century BC, at least 1500 years before those quaint Middle Age paintings of a flat earth appeared.
Also contrary to popular belief, a flat earth was not an orthodox Christian teaching. Leading orthodox Christian figures such as Bede and Thomas Aquinas supported the idea of a spherical Earth. There are today, however, Christians who do advocate flat earth, claiming support for this from the scriptures.
However, it might be surprising to some that Creation Ministries International, a creationist organisation that teaches early Genesis chapters as literal history, do not support flat earth theory. One of their articles outlining their arguments against, created quite a furore.
Ancient history also tells us that a Greek mathematician by the name of Eratosthenes carried out a remarkable experiment to calculate the circumfrence of the globe circa 240BC. He employed a relatively straight-forward process with geometry and basic maths to quite accurately calculate the circumference distance. Although his manuscript detailing this is now lost, the technique has been described by other Greek historians and writers.
Eratosthenes had heard from travelers that at noon (usually June 221st) on the summer solstice at a well in Syene (now Aswan, Egypt) the sun illuminated the entire bottom of this well, without casting any shadows, indicating that the sun was directly overhead.
Eratosthenes then measured the angle of a shadow cast by a stick at noon on the summer solstice in Alexandria, and found it made an angle of about 7.2 degrees, or about 1/50 of a complete circle.
Helped by professional surveyors to calculate the distance between Syene and Alexandria, he was able to calculate the circumference of the earth as 250,000 stadia or between 24,000 and 29,000 miles. Some accounts say he paid a man to pace out the distance, more than 800km – a remarkable feat in itself.
Our modern-day gnostics will however, question this, as they are entitled to do. But we can only ask that they seriously consider the fact that men, ancient and modern, were in no doubt about the nature of the planet we live on. After all, the moon, so clear for all mankind in all ages to see in its full glory, is a pretty strong clue as to what we live on.