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Author Topic: "Flat" Earth -- Complete Balderdash  (Read 116599 times)

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Offline Ladislaus

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Re: "Flat" Earth -- Complete Balderdash
« Reply #65 on: May 11, 2018, 10:01:26 AM »
Quote from: happenby on May 11, 2018, 09:42:10 AM
Equally true is that Scripture CANNOT be credibly interpreted as describing earth is a globe.

But it can be credibly interpreted as describing neither one, i.e. not attempting to describe the shape of the earth at all.

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Offline happenby

Re: "Flat" Earth -- Complete Balderdash
« Reply #66 on: May 11, 2018, 10:05:28 AM »
Quote from: An even Seven on May 11, 2018, 08:19:05 AM
There are few that one can point to it being their opinion. Lactantius is the only one which claims it's a matter of faith. St. Basil and St. Augustine explicitly say this topic is not in Scripture and is not worthy of serious thought. No one's saying they were ignorant. The ones who did hold the FE opinion seemed to hold it not as a matter of faith, but as the common opinion where they were. Like I said though, there weren't that many who wrote about it.
The only reason it's debatable is because the FE's are trying to destroy all credibility of the Church, so they try to tie it into the Catholic Faith. They get Catholics to believe in it by exaggerating the importance among the Fathers and twisting Scripture to attempt to make it a religious matter. There's a reason why this subject was not brought up for about 1500 years.
By the way, the second paragraph reveals your problem.  How could FE destroy the credibility of the Church except for fear of being called stupid for believing it?  It's a popular notion that anyone who thinks the world is flat, must be stupid, a very clever and effective game the propagandists would love to continue. It shows human respect.  FE is beautiful and sensible.  Many elements of the Church, the tabernacle and the liturgy, are tied to it, according to the Fathers. 
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Offline Jaynek

Re: "Flat" Earth -- Complete Balderdash
« Reply #67 on: May 11, 2018, 10:06:30 AM »
Quote from: happenby on May 11, 2018, 09:40:29 AM
You are spreading false information in suggesting that Scripture is allegorical as if the literal sense does not take precedence.  
Scripture must always be interpreted in the literal unless proven otherwise. 
There is a bit of confusion here, possibly due to terminology.  When one speaks of allegory that means things like a spiritualized meaning.  For example, we are required to believe there was a literal, historical Adam and Eve.  We cannot say that Adam and Eve are merely a symbol representing the human condition.  It is permitted to say that there are multiple levels of meaning.  So, in the example of Adam and Eve, they both really existed in history and are spiritual symbols.

This is a different issue from figures of speech.  When we see a phrase like "God saved the people with a mighty arm" we should not take that literally and claim that God has a physical body. There is no requirement to take figures of speech literally and it can be an error to do so. In traditional Catholic (spherical earth) geocentrism and more recent understandings of spherical earth, Catholics understood Scripture that uses flat earth imagery to be using figures of speech.

There is usually no requirement to prove that something is a figure of speech.  Normally it is something that is obvious to reason.  The majority of Catholics throughout history, including Saints and Doctors of the Church, thought that it was obvious to reason that flat earth language in Scripture was a figure of speech.
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Offline Ladislaus

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Re: "Flat" Earth -- Complete Balderdash
« Reply #68 on: May 11, 2018, 10:08:07 AM »
Quote from: Neil Obstat on May 11, 2018, 09:33:09 AM
I won't be surprised if Ladislaus conveniently ignores this question.

Stop acting like a baby, would you?

I looked at the video.  It's simply trying to show that the math of sun direction looks cleaner on a globe model vs. flat earth.  It's the same reasoning used to promote heliocentrism, that geocentric math is ugly compared to heliocentric.  In the video, the beams are shown as crossing over one another, but if you cut them off sooner, they generally converge into a triangle at some point.  So the way it's represented in the video makes it look uglier and nearly impossible, since once they converge at the triangle, then they take off in opposite directions, which would make a single light source impossible.  So cut off the arrows as soon as they converge, at a closer distance to the earth, and it's not quite as ugly as this video makes it out to be.  And this falls short of "proof" also.  Where's the hard proof?  Flat earthers could take this video as proof that the sun is much closer to the earth than science tells us.
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Offline Jaynek

Re: "Flat" Earth -- Complete Balderdash
« Reply #69 on: May 11, 2018, 10:08:18 AM »
Quote from: Ladislaus on May 11, 2018, 10:01:26 AM
But it can be credibly interpreted as describing neither one, i.e. not attempting to describe the shape of the earth at all.
This interpretation is the one supported in magisterial teaching, so I think it is more than credible.  
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