Flat earth

Shape of the earth

Is the earth flat or round or spherical rather than flat?

That seems easy to answer but there is a recent rise in the Flat earth idea.

There are a great many people that are thinking the earth is flat and that we have been lied to.

Well I know we have been lied to often from birth to death. This I know simply from my personal experience with people. I also know that many people are wrong in what they think but continue to promote the lies they have accepted as true because they do not see any different.

I know when waking up to the number of lies that I had been told as I grew up that my first question and impulse was to doubt everything. I began to doubt much of what I was taught starting with the first revelations about the existence or none existence of Santa. I mean if you cannot trust your parents who can you trust?

I believe we are traumatized by the liars of the world and there are many who lie. Most of the people who tell us lies are deceived themselves. But this does little to overcome the trauma of living in a world of liars and deceivers.

There was years in the seminary and conversations with men I learned to trust about things hidden from us by the Vatican. When I listened to them reveal what they had come to believe I listened to their heart and looked into their experience and felt their story.

These men had given their lives in service of a Church. They had suffered untold abuse and torture because of their faith. They confessed that they had discovered they had been lied to by the very Church they had preached in foreign lands. They had been imprisoned, beat, starved and physically broken and yet there they were still seemingly in the very Church who had deceived them and deceives many people.

How did they manage that?

How did they function in the midst of such a paradox?

I saw them do good.

They seemed to be good but humble men who did not want praise but simply desired to serve and set men free.

We know the truth sets you free but we also know that most people cannot handle the truth.

I saw they often had almost miraculous insight.

They seem to be moving in a different way.

It seemed that their motivator in life had nothing to do with that which motivated men to lie or deceive.

How do we, can we, function in a world that lies to us?

Where is the truth?

How do we know the truth is the truth?

What is our motivation to find out the truth?

I understand our desire to know the truth although our motivation to know it may very.

I understand our personal need to root out and expose every lie although our motivation to do so may differ?

But it is one thing to lie to us about something as selfish and self serving as Santa but to deceive us about Christ and the fundamentals of the very purpose of or existence and our immortal soul could seem unforgivable.

And there is the answer.

We have to forgive the liar.

Then we can be objective in our observations.

If we do not then his lie whether we accept it or reject it will become the motivator of our life and therefore influence our observations as well as our understanding of what we see.

If we are to know the truth we need to know the truth about ourselves first.

Observations of a youth upon the earth

I do not live at the sea at this time but when I sailed boats off the coast of Florida the beach would disappear as we went farther out. Eventually the land would disappear. When I sailed from LA and California I could see the mountains for a long time but the elevations are much different than they are in Florida. When I sat at the tiller my eye was not much more than 6 feet off the water. I could see what I imagined to be the shore line but I was looking for the rocks marking the entry to the harbor. I do remember looking for the rocks that mark the harbor which were actually closer and recall that I was happy when they came into view. I also remember when out at sea I could see the mast of sail boats before I could see the deck.

I also know the sea is not flat even in a flat earth because there are subtle swells caused by storms miles away that are observable even on the calmest of days.

But this is not scientific since I was not trying to prove anything but simply remembering observations from my youth.

The answer is in the question

Why do Time zones work consistently? I do not understand how the Flat earth society explains time zones since if the earth is flat there could be none. Why is it dark in Australia when it is light in Oregon?

I do not understand how the Flat earth society theory also would explain the seasons and the long dark days in Barrow during the season of winter if the earth was flat.

Some excuse this with a small close sun. The problem is with personal observations starting over half a century ago. I have personally watched and tracked sunspots on the sun's surface with mechanical scopes. I have watched live feeds show coronal mas Ejections leave the sun and hit the earth and the other planets and track their speed to the planets and watched the effect of their arrival which creates auroras on the surface of other planets just like they do on earth. This could not be true on a close sun model.

Then there is the Coriolis effect that fits a round planet theory. But of course, the flat earth people simply say there is another reason. Having watched spinning hurricanes on Mars following the same model it begs to ask the question why is the earth acting like a round planet.

Then there is celestial mechanics which begs the question of why does Orion look upside down in Australia if Australia is not under the globe of the earth but on the same plane?

This is exactly what you would expect to see on a round earth floating in space spinning on an axis.

I watched a 15 minute video proving that the world is flat by watching a ship leave a harbor and estimating how far out it was. As the math popped up on the screen it appeared someone's calculations were off by at least 35 feet even if they had their distance correct. You actually see the ship change course to start to accommodate for the current out at sea. Only about 6 feet at most of the ship should have disappeared over the horizon. The truth is seamen have been climbing into crows nests high up on masts looking for land and other ships for centuries.

High in the mast on a pitching sea is a terrifying place but they keep climbing up there. Why?

Because the guy up there spots what they are looking for first.

Why?

Because he has a view over the horizon.

Supposedly Eratosthenes of Alexandria (circa 276 to 194 or 192 B.C.) calculated the circumference of the earth “within 50 miles of the present estimate.”

He was also one of the first to calculate the tilt of the Earth's axis with remarkable accuracy.

The Greeks understood that the earth is round by observing lunar eclipses when the earth blocks the sun from the moon, casting its round shadow on the moon's surface which they predicted using some of the same math.

Another method is simultaneously measuring the length of the shadows cast by identical poles perpendicular to a flat surface that is tangential to the earth's radius at various, distant locations.

Still, people will argue the point.

What do you see?

This whole idea of flat or round came up at an interesting time for me. I watched another video where someone used a flat earth video to prove the earth was round. The very same video proved to two different people the opposite fact. What I found it both versions was the same spirit. They were both energetically "adamant" about what they saw and what it proved even though they were looking at the same thing.

What I heard was might be called a contentious and defensive spirit. I recalled building large wooden corrals out in the next valley with a friend on a cold winter morning. As we continued worked all day doing a laborious repetitive task to keep warm we also talked about many things just to keep are minds off the discomfort and pain of digging, setting huge posts, bolting rail after rail after rail over and over again through out the long days of ice and penetrating cold.

I had just expounded on some new topic and my partner began to take the opposing view. He vehemently argued through his frosty beard against what I said expounding an contrary stand with the same energetic tone I now hear in the flat round debate. I listened intently and he seemed to sense an audience and orated to meet the moment.

But as he became more energized by this soap box position I got calmer and pondered not just what he said but why he was saying it. I knew that is not what he normally thought. I felt detached from what he was saying so did not feel a reason to contend with what he was saying.

He suddenly came to the end and in the moment of silence we stared at each other as if there was an expectation of something.

Then I calmly stated as a matter of fact as if telling someone the time, "You don't believe that. You just want to argue because of the cold."

Another pause until he broke the silence with a very honest "Yeah."

We laughed against the cold instead of argue and our spirits were lifted even though the temperature was not.

We were born in trauma to parents who were also traumatized. That trauma or the pain of it is with us all the time. We contend and resist things in the world that touch those soft spots, those emotional buttons. The contentious spirit will fight against any thing and anyone rather than deal with the trauma. The resistance it and draw the spirit of contention to free us from the pain.

We have beliefs to make us feel safe and secure.

When we are betrayed and do not forgive we will contend with anything and everything the wicked believe. We will not want any part of what they believe or think. We will argue and fight against them even if they are right. Our focus is directed by our unforgiving heart and though we rebel or resist them we often become like the very thing we hate.

There is much written about the contentious spirit.

Bible

We see written in the Bible about 700 BC

Isaiah 26:7 "He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing."

Isaiah 40:22 [It is] he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof [are] as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:

And what was written about 2000+ is a God's eye view of earth

Job 26:10 He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, At the boundary of light and darkness.

Some people think the Bible says that the earth is flat because of Job 38:13 That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?" But the word ends actually means something far off or maybe hidden. The word is only translated ends twice and wings 74 times.

We do see in the phrase "ends of the earth" Jeremiah 16:19 O LORD, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction, the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and [things] wherein [there is] no profit.

This verse is not talking about geography but the failure of men to do what is right.

The word ends here is a different word ephec which has to do with failure or our end upon the earth and not the end of the earth itself. The next verse is Jeremiah 16:20 Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they [are] no gods?

This would take us to the idea of what or who are these gods we make?