Would you believe your own, fallible eyes over the revealed Word of God?

Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to: a choice of axioms, those statements which are the basis of reasoning. Now, different axioms lead to different conclusions — sometimes very different conclusions, as here. They may have different utility for achieving practical goals, or even paint different goals as desirable or undesirable.

However, unless they’re technically deficient in some way (inconsistent, unintelligible), there isn’t really anything to prefer one set of axioms over all others.

can you rub someones nose in an ideology?

From an epistemological standpoint, there is a strong argument that no real axioms exist, because an axiom must be a self-evident truth upon which all other knowledge depends. Inductively, you can’t really prove any self-evident truths.

Not terribly lavishly, I would expect.

If your education never made it past the basic shape of a planet, your earning power is probably such that you’re better off just keeping your legs together.

For anyone who doesnt know what it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Spot
http://currents.ucsc.edu/05-06/10-03/mystery.asp

I’m pretty sure a reasonable system could be constructed accounting for the de-emphasis of some verses and re-interpretation of others and all the other things that go on in a real faith. It’d probably be fascinating to construct (or read; odds are somebody’s already done the actual work). It might or might not be pretty, and it might or might not have unrestricted modus ponens, but neither of those are a requirement.

As for the existence of axioms, one generally believes in their truth not because it would be self-evident, but because the consequences are intuitively appealing :-)

Disingenuous.

I knew I retained something from physics class.

Note too that if you consider the oceans to be a component of the shape, then you must add tidal bulges, along the Earth-Moon axis. Thus, even conceiving of the rotating body as an oblate spheroid, you must consider that body stretched along a (constantly changing) equatorial axis due to this tidal effect. I don’t recall if the Earth itself is deformed by it’s tidal lock to the Moon. If so, it’s a very small effect, whereas the Moon must be deformed so, structurally, which is the cause of the moon’s tidal lock.

I only recently learned of the idea of Gauss’s geoid, which describes the earth’s shape as sort of surface averaged irregular body. It’s another interesting data point.

How did Barbara Walters end up with this idiot Sherri? What an embarassment. Did she not make it through nursery school? I knew when I was 3 that the earth was round. And she doesnt care. No wonder the country is in such a crisis about science literacy. Walters should just let the show degenerate into a Jerry Springeresque thing. She needs to keep this idiot, bring Rosie back, along with Ann Coulter, and the last spot can be alternated between OJ and Michael Vick. It will be great.

How is the outdoors concrete slab an illusion? You can even check it with a bubble-level. It looks horizontal.
People standing normally on a horizontal concrete slab shouldn’t tend to lean in any one direction.
So why is there a leaning tendency?

I don’t particularly want to believe kooky/non-kooky things. I want a scientific explanation.

In a Gravity Hill optical illusion, the ground appears horizontal to the eye, when it is not.

At the Mystery Spot, we have empirically verified that the ground is horizontal. So it’s not a “Gravity Hill” illusion.

http://dj-perl.livejournal.com/86501.html

Contradiction spur discussion. Study and discussion of the Torah is a great thing, and is a great mental exercise that teaches you how to question and debate. The various people who based Christianity on the Old Testament don’t have the foggiest notion of what its purpose was – the respect doesn’t come from the infallibility of the document, but from the millennia of experience on how to structure a society that’s in it, and the study, debate, and refinement of those perspectives from the past.

Because for some people, it’s a verb: they actively choose to ignore the facts. And for other people, it’s even more active: they invent new “facts” to maintain their ignorance. As: the pictures of the Earth from space must be faked.

The bigger question: what encourages people to actively ignore mountains of evidence? To openly defy centuries of study? To huddle together in ignorant defiance?

Now here’s where I have the biggest problem with what Shepherd was saying in this video: She’s contradicting herself right there in the course of less than a minute. She states that she believes with absolute certainty that the world was Created (capital C), and got cut off before she was about to say “in Seven Days” (my guess, even though technically it should be SIX days… most people don’t make the distinction, though). But then she takes the things that were said about the Earth being round and backpedals, saying that it must be “one of those markers”.

Excuse me?

The Bible says that the earth is flat. It also says that it has “pillars” and “corners”. So right there, she’s obviously picking and choosing what to believe.

I have never understood why people can say that obviously PARTS of the Bible are wrong (the parts that deal with slavery, for example), but other parts are right, and yet be the same people who say that they believe “every word” that’s printed in it. Not to mention the fact that the FIRST TWO STORIES IN THE BIBLE contradict one another.

Yes, that’s right, ladies and gents: the first two chapters in the Book of Genesis are COMPLETELY CONTRADICTORY stories of Creation:

(taken from http://www.skepticfiles.org/atheist/bible3do.htm)

Here is the order in the first (Genesis 1), the Priestly tradition:

Day 1: Sky, Earth, light
Day 2: Water, both in ocean basins and above the sky(!)
Day 3: Plants
Day 4: Sun, Moon, stars (as calendrical and navigational aids)
Day 5: Sea monsters (whales), fish, birds, land animals, creepy-crawlies (reptiles, insects, etc.)
Day 6: Humans (apparently both sexes at the same time)
Day 7: Nothing (the Gods took the first day off anyone ever did)

Note that there are “days”, “evenings”, and “mornings” before the Sun was created. Here, the Deity is referred to as “Elohim”, which is a plural, thus the literal translation, “the Gods”. In this tale, the Gods seem satisfied with what they have done, saying after each step that “it was good”.

The second one (Genesis 2), the Yahwist tradition, goes:

Earth and heavens (misty)
Adam, the first man (on a desolate Earth)
Plants
Animals
Eve, the first woman (from Adam’s rib)

So how, exactly, can a person claim to believe what is so obviously a MYTH (in the same vein as the great Myths of the Greek gods), and is told not once, but TWICE, and in a contradictory manner? It’s logically impossible to say that you believe “every word” in the Bible.

That’s not to say that there aren’t valuable lessons in it. The Bible, at its core, is a strong philosophical document, even if not a truly historical one.

I do believe in God. I always have. I believe in God because I can’t honestly conceive of a universe in which He doesn’t exist. But why is it so hard for people to accept that maybe, just maybe, the people who compiled the Bible and told stories over six thousand years ago were possibly trying to just figure it out, just like we are today?

“Poor Barbara Walters” is my first impression. They keep pairing her up with freaks because I guess ABC thinks that good, honost journalism isn’t entertaining enough and they need a Rosie or a Sherri in there to spice things up and pump up the ratings.

On the other hand, the radical Rosie and the lives-under-a-rock Sherri are, sadly, representative of not-insubstantial amounts of the population, and that’s what The View was trying to originally do: represent multiple viewpoints, from different generations and walks of life.

So maybe Sherri is doing her job. She’s representing that part of the population that has no interest whatsoever in even the most basic scientific principles. It’s good to know that people like this exist, because it lets us know exactly how much work we still need to do.

The mysterious phenomenon is observable outdoors, on a level concrete slab. They even provide a bubble-level that you can use to verify that the slab is level.

I’m not ruling out a hoax at all. They could be using rigged bubble-levels, on an uneven plane.
They could be using any number of perceptual illusions to their advantage.

They invite you to bring your own bubble-levels or other instruments. You really have to see it for yourself.

Please, un-educate yourself! There is little consensus among “all educated people”. Is education a status symbol? A rubberstamp of approval by the mainstream, that lets me close my mind with scoffing cliches like “how can any educated person…?” ?

It is precisely because I’m educated (to a little extent) that I raise difficult questions instead of being content with textbook answers.

“Spirituality” and science are both considered approaches to knowledge. The difference is, science has to rigorously prove itself. In spirituality, vague, subjective feelings are acceptable means of knowing.
For this reason, I like Science! Of course, scientists use intuitive insights to solve problems. However, they always have to verify intuitions rigorously.

As for the Mystery Spot — don’t take my word for it. Go see it for yourself. Please come back with a scientific explanation and enlighten us all.
Inquiring minds want to know!

http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm
(be sure to check the membership form!)

http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/

Somewhere in the Darkly Aged bowels of the first site is a description of a mission which involves getting Flat Earthers covertly embedded in the media. Zoinks! Sherri’s cover is blown!

classic.

big props to andrewjc for having the contrarian-balls to speak up in generally-religion-bashing thread.

The problem isn’t religious people, the problem is religious idiots and religious nuts (not sure if these are separate groups). Sadly, the latter outnumber the former.

AndrewJC (19): Also, the chronologies of the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John don’t match. And that’s just for starters. You may enjoy the Song of Songs, illustrated for literalists.

TheCynic (20), I’m with Doggo on the subject of Sherri Shephard: the word for that performance is disingenuous. Every little kid in this country think about whether the world is flat the way it looks, or round the way they tell us it is. If Shephard’s ever traveled any great distance, she has to have come up against the question, since airline travel paths don’t make sense in a flat world. And she can’t have lived as many years as she has without seeing globes, images of the earth from space, and other models that imply a round earth.

I expect she was dodging the question because it’s an embarrassment to Biblical literalists. That’s not a crime, but it is disingenuous.