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Philosophy, Religion & Society / This topic contains a little story.

« on: April 16, 2013, 01:47:52 PM »

I have a nice story for you. The best thing is, that the story is a true one. It happened in Papua New Guinea in one of the early decades of the last century.

It's about the encounter of a missionary with a nameless savage philosopher and his views  about the existence of God. You must understand, he had never heard about that concept, for in his country they believed in every kind of spirits and magical forces, but they definitely had no belief in God.

Our priest was one of the - not quite uncommon - kind of missionarys, who had some interest in the belief systems he was paid to destroy. (therefore I guess that he was rather successful in his work). But as anywhere in the world, most people he met didn't waste much thought in what they believed, and when he asked any deeper going questions, they frequently pointed to a certain village, whose inhabitants were said to be exeptionally thoughtful and knowledgable. It was, so to speak, the Athens of this remote hill valley.

I have no information that he did ever go to this village. Can be he either had no time or his interest was not deep enough. But one day a man from there appeared at the mission station to hear about the message of the foreign ju ju man, one who was known to be well versed in secret things, and the missionary, of course, was glad about that and eager to explain him the essentials of the Christian religion. The philosopher, naked exept a long penis gourd, listened quiet and carefully, and when he took his leave he promised to bethink what he was told and come again on the next day to give response.

Next morning he arrived at the  missionary's hut again and said: "I thought about God this night and I tell you he doesn't exist. You self have proven it."

The missionary was surprised. "No, surely you must have misunderstood something. God most certainly exists. Didn't I say he created everything?"

"That's the point", said the philosopher, "you say he created everything?"

"Sure he did!"

"Everything that exists?"

"Yes, my friend."

"So did he create himself?"

"Oh...no! God has allways been there and he will allways be."

"So if everything that exists is created by God , but God himself is not created by God, I must conclude that God does not exist. But if he does not exist, how can you pray to him?" said the primitive and back he went to his fields.

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Flat Earth Q&A / Apparent Magnitude

« on: March 17, 2013, 08:33:59 AM »

In FET the height of of stars above the horizon changes with latitude because the distance to each star changes with our location on earth. Right? That's why we cannot see every star everywhere on this flat earth, for some are simply to far away. But why then does the apparent magnitude of the stars not change with latitude? A star of mag 5.8 is always 5.8. Couldn't find substantial discussion on this topic so far.

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Flat Earth Debate / Modest contribution to the flat earth map distance problem

« on: March 11, 2013, 04:50:05 AM »

Objects that travel from north to south suffer a kind of time dilation. This makes distances seem shorter than they really are. If you continue to travel south, beyond the ice wall, time dilation would probably increase to such an amount, that, what is really a circle of some 60 000 km seems to be a point (the south pole).

This time delation must be a phenomenon different from the one resulting from Einstein's theory. But since the negative outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment can easily be explained if earth is stationary, we would have to question his findings anyway. That doesn't mean he was completely wrong but flat earth physics is obviously not the same than the established one.

I regard these few lines as one of the biggest contributions to flat earth theory ever and a giant step in overcoming Rowbothamism and its non-zetetic heritage.

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Technology, Science & Alt Science / A little piece of history

« on: March 08, 2013, 02:02:40 AM »

Don't know if anybody cares. Did some petty research in science history.

Around the middle of the first millenium BC astronomers had realized that earth is curved. Curved, not necessarily spherical.
The "astronomers", not the "Greeks"! And the main reason was the observation that the height of stars and of the sun altered with latitude, which otherwise could not be explained. Since Babylonia was still the center of astronomy then, not Greece, the curvedness of earth's surface was much likely a Babylonian ("Chaldaean") discovery. As late as 500 AD Cosmas Indicopleustes noted, that the Chaldaeans conceived earth as having the shape of a shield, that means a disc but with a bulge.

In the time of Plato and Aristotle this was the main model taught by natural philosophers like Anaxagoras and Democrit, while the progression to a spherical model was initially rather a philosophical, even mystical thing. The first who taught like that were the Pythagoreans, because they considered the sphere as the most perfect shape. For Plato earth was a sphere, but his conception was weird, because for him the material world was something like a valley in a huge sphere-shaped thing that constituted the real "ideal" world from which the world we conceive is just a shadow. It's understandable that more sober minds prefered to hold to the shield model. With the likes of Aristotle everything changed, he formed the spherical earth model into a scientific theory which explained phenomena at best. Later on all philosophical schools in Greece had earth as a sphere exept the Epicureans, the most materialistic school, who retained the shield model.

So FEs are right when they say, "Globularism" comes from philosophy, not from science. But they are only partial right, because the discovery of the curvedness of earth predates globularism and did not originate from speculation but from evidence.