Talk:Biblical flat earth claims

This is getting silly. Heart ♥  Gold tx 23:55, 20 June 2007 (CDT)

Dogma?
FaAfA, what is so particularly "dogmatic" about pointing out that Dan. 4:10-11 takes place in a dream, and why is that undesirable? -- AKjeldsen Godspeed! 01:17, 21 June 2007 (CDT)


 * I'm not sure the fact that Dan. 4:10-11 describes a dream is relevant. If one imagines a tree visible to all the earth, then surely that is still assuming the earth is flat. Also, if 'vision' passages are discounted, then wouldn't that applied to Revelation as well? --Stevo (talk) 05:54, 25 June 2007 (CDT)


 * Well, the problem is that under the Biblical Literalism scheme, which the Flat Earthers tend to be a sub-group of, the Bible is able to stand on its own without human interpretation or extrapolation being necessary. But the problem with Dan 4:10-11 when used as evidence for the Flat Earthers' theory is that it is specifically described a dream sequence, and it never makes any claims to making a statement about a physical reality. So the only way it can be used as evidence is by either taking the passage completely out of context or assuming that it speaks about reality as well. In either case, they're effectively abandoning their own theological viewpoint. As for Revelation, yes, certainly. -- AKjeldsen Godspeed! 14:52, 26 June 2007 (CDT)

Don't forget Jesus being taken up to a mountain-top and seeing _all_ the kingdoms of the world. Can't do THAT on a sphere. --Gulik 18:43, 26 June 2007 (CDT)

Revelation
Revelation is a series of visions, isn't it? If so, it's not much evidence to support the claim. So that's one left, out of three. Although one was enough for the SDAs I knew. Totnesmartin 20:06, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Biblical Discussion
The whole discussion of biblical text in this article might be doing more damage than good, in my opinion. The bible, as a literary text, uses a lot of poetic language, and it is hard to determine thousands of years after it was written what was meant literally and what was not.

The phrase "four corners of the earth" is a good example: In modern Hebrew, it is used figuratively. In the bible it might have been used figuratively or literally: one would need a serious researcher of ancient Hebrew texts to even get a good guess on this question. So I think that giving the appearance of this phrase in the bible as evidence of something is "not even wrong". Ditto about the quotes where the bible presumably says that the earth is flat.

I'd say that the best way to get a guess on whether the authors of the bible knew the earth was flat is to consider the date at which various parts of the bible were written, and check if this was before or after 300-600 BC, which is presumably the time where Greek scholars figured out that the earth was round. I think it's not particularly serious to claim that the bible goes either way.

A slight problem with the claims from the gospels
The problem is that the term "Kingdom" is a construct. If you put everything outside the line of sight as "not kingdom"s, because you can treat them as barbaric tribes from this point of view for all practical purposes, that should be compatible to a spherical earth. User:K61824User_talk:K61824 16:22, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Could do with expansion
There's a pretty detailed cosmology of the flat earth in the Bible which matches similar legends of the time. (I have details, er, somewhere.) This article also gets linked a bit, so expansion is good if anyone can! - David Gerard (talk) 13:11, 9 September 2014 (UTC)