Dear Laura,
I have said this a number of times on this forum that there is much more evidence avaialbe than modern Christians want to accept. There are many more divine revelations than the words in the Bible that everyone is looking at. Orthodoxy does not seem to recognize Jesus’s promise to keep sending prophets (John 14:17 15:26 16:13), to the spirit of truth to continue His teaching.
In addition, there is a wealth of spiritual evidence that many choose not to accept, that provides much more information about the world we live in than the limits of the material sciences.
Yes, God sent the Holy Spirit to indwell believers. But also,
1 John 4:1:
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can call himself a prophet and start selling books. We don’t just accept “spiritual evidence” because someone calls it “spiritual evidence” any more than we’d accept “scientific evidence from NASA” just because a random YouTube superstar makes a claim about it.
But people are are highly selective about what information they what to believe, and misinformation can be spread even faster than information. There are plenty of other reasons why people choose not to see facts.
Belief in YECism was dying out until the visions of the Seventh Day Adventist prophetess brought it back to the mainstream.
BTW that Mark Sargent guy is a particularly crazy flat earther. He believes the entire sky is a hologram projected onto the firmament after the Tower of Babel incident
That wouldn’t be too surprising. It was probably also helped along by the general clamor towards mechanistic understandings of the universe, which also influenced our approach to biblical understanding. Then in the resulting furor of “higher” biblical criticism, the reactionary fundamentalism wall all too happy to pick up the other end of that rope, and YECism quickly got its formational nourishment from that polarized contest. Or something like that.
It would be interesting to know what the source fuels of other conspiracy theories are like our flat-earthers.
That would be anti-government sentiment. They don’t want you to know, what the government won’t tell you, etc. I asked what happens when a person walks to the edge of the earth for a peek, and was told that the government turns you back.
And I think that must be mixed with a kind of reverential awe toward the government and how powerful it allegedly is to be able to pull all this off.
I remember growing up with something of a mentality that “government agents” (read: FBI, secret service, secret agent types … that sort of thing) were the de-facto archetypes of power in my little-boy fantasies. Where other kids were more exposed to and immersed in super-hero comics, my imagination tended to glamorize what I imagined were real-life, high-up government people. Maybe that says something about the household I grew up in and some sort of “respect for authority” that was inculcated in us. Certainly there must not have been too much anti-government (or pro-small government) sentiment expressed. But had there been, perhaps my naive admiration for imagined unlimited powers would have been turned more toward conspiracy theory.
No, I have not studied the revelations from Joseph Smith to see if they passed the 1 John 4 tests. I cannot verify that he was inspired by a spirit of truth, but it is interesting to see how a series of (young) revelations were not maintained in their entirety. It was not until the age of media that it was possible to record such revelations and to be able to properly investigate them.
Where is the edge of the earth for the flat earthers? Presumably wherever they say, we could show them otherwise by crossing it?
YECers usually have the bottom line “The Bible says it, so I believe it”. So God supposedly trumps science. Do flat earthers have any bottom line like this?
Not Phil, but I’ll answer your questions as best I can. The “orthodox” flat earth model looks like this…
…with the North Pole at the center of a flat disk. Notice also the quasi-firmament of the sky, w/ the sun & moon cycling like the balancing elements of an old clock. What we know as Antarctica apparently forms the outer perimeter. One flat-earther in the documentary claimed that the outer rim is an enormous ice wall. I don’t know what happens if you start trekking across Antarctica…maybe your compass screws up because the entire perimeter is functionally the magnetic South Pole, so you just end up walking in a big circle.
As for your second question, I really cannot say. A couple guys on the documentary make reference to the Bible, but don’t appear to otherwise be overtly fundamentalist. Primarily, they seem to appeal simply to their own knowledge of this great Truth, rather than to any sort of scripture. So rather than the familiar YEC refrain of “we’re right, and God’s word shows that he clearly agrees with us,” it’s more of a “we’re right, because we’re right” kind of thing.
