🚀 go-pugleaf

dnk@world.net   (David Kay) wrote:

>In <3rqcr9$a4g@dingo.cc.uq.oz.au>, shelter@peg.apc.org (Madhudvisah dasa Swami) writes:
>>The "flat earth" idea came from a posting related to the book "Telling
>>Lies for God" where some atheist was spouting his view that the Bible was
>>invalid as it described the Earth as flat...
>>
>>So I thought it would be a nice exercise to investigate intellectually if
>>one could actually come up with a consistent world-view based on a
>>flat-earth...

>Hi Bozo!

>I'm the atheist that was sprouting my view that the Bible was invalid
>as it described the earth as flat.

Thank you. It started an interesting discussion.

>  Actually, I said that creation
>'scientists" claim that the Bible was inerrant (they mean literally
>true, but they're not too bright).  I then gave a number of examples
>of "facts" in the Bible that we now know are false.  That the Earth was
>flat was one of them.

>I never claimed that the Bible was "invalid", whatever that means.
>I simply said that to treat it as a scientific book was stupidity.

>Your lack of comprehension skills is matched only by your intellectual
>weakness.  In response to this you posted a load of rubbish about an
>"intellectual exercise", pretending that the world actually was flat.

I was exploring the model, that's all. Many things can be explained
according to this view [more than I initially expected]... It is true that
we see the world through our own "model"... And there can be more than one
model that fits the observations...

>Obviously your definition of intellectual is different from mine - it
>seemed more like an exercise in futility to me.  

No. It was certainly not futile. 

>Perhaps the reason people
>were reluctant to indulge you in your little game was that they saw it
>as a complete waste of time?

Well some were reluctant, of course, but many, many people have been [and
still are] discussing things which grew out of it. So it was valuable.

>There is ample evidence that the Earth is round.

I never said it wasn't round. I merely suggested it might be flat... It is
still round.

>  Boats and planes don't
>drop over the edge,

You obviously didn't read the articles. There is no edge... Everything
looks exactly the same as we see it now. The only problem I had was
annoying distance discrepancies as one gets closer to the south pole and a
problem in the Southern Hemisphere sky... Otherwise everything was fine.

> the stars in the sky are in different positions,
>according to your position on the Earth.

Yes. They are in the flat earth model too. But I haven't worked it out
completely. It is a little tricky...

>  These are simple observations
>that people made thousands of years ago, yet they seem to elude you.

No. They haven't eluded me. I was exploring to see if theses same "simple
observations" could be explained using a completely different model of the
universe. It may sound unreasonable to you but it is a valid exercise.

>Now we have even more proof: hundreds of satellites are orbiting the
>Earth right now, and we've seen photographs of the Earth taken from space.

The satellites [except for the polar orbiting ones] are not a problem at
all. The photos from space well... that's not so easy to explain :-(

>Jerking-off about "world views", as if this made nonsense reasonable,
>changes none of this.

No. We all see the world differently. It's not nonsense.

 < the rest has degenerated into meaningless mud slinging... >
Thank you. Hare Krishna!

Madhudvisah dasa Swami
(shelter@peg.apc.org)      http://www.peg.apc.org/~shelter/ctfote
                                
Quotes from His Divine Grace A.C.Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada 
(c)Bhaktivedanta Book Trust