Flat 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 sea 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.

So a simple question or two

I do not understand how the Flat earth society explains time zones since if the earth is flat there could be none.

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.

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.

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:gods we make?