RE: What do invented saints tell us about Christianity?
November 16, 2019 at 9:32 am
(This post was last modified: November 16, 2019 at 10:12 am by The Grand Nudger.)
To say that something plato thought was the "majority view" makes about as much sense as saying that since francis crick doesn't have an issue with biology, that's the majority view of christendom.
Most of christendom (and everyone else) then, like most of christendom today, continued to believe in the traditional..and very wrong..things in their magic books. Those things were the cultural inheritance of pagan influences in proto christianity (a category that plato and his thoughts also belonged to), which surrounded them on all sides, as well as coming from within. Even within the very, very limited field of proto christian academia, we have no end of examples of the shamans in charge of important groups arguing for, and yes..being argued against, on the subject of a flat earth.
There is seemingly no end to the excuses you will make for other peoples superstitions, and their history.
Continuing further, for the non apologists - the earliest positions on a spherical earth weren't actually all that enlightened or based on clear thinking either. Many were derived arbitrarily from some other set of myths or ideals, and even the people who held them had trouble understanding how it was that the earth could be round - how there could be people opposite and under, or why the water "above" didn't drain away and "down" to that other side, or completely away.
They resorted, in nearly every case, to god-magic as an explanation for all of this. It's understandable, given their place in time and lack of fundamental knowledge required to comprehend those ideas we find so simple and self evident today that we teach them to five year olds. As sagan put it, the simplest idea, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning. They simply did not possess those intermediate steps between what could be seen, and the counter-intuitive reality it described. Most got it right by accident, which isn't exactly getting it right at all.
If we wanmt to point to someone who made the case well, it would be Eratosthenes, not Plato. He had heard of a place where a stick cast no shadow at specific times. Having a good idea of the distance between alexandria and that well based on others work in the field over centuries...he then commissioned an expedition to see if that was just a rumor, and, when it wasn't, they literally walked out the distance just to check it. Using that distance and the difference between the shadows angles, he was able to make a very accurate calculation as to the circumference of the earth, and he concluded that those effects simply would not be possible if the earth were any other shape.
He was also a xenophobic bigot who thought that superior greek blood should be kept pure from that of the barbaric unter-mensch. That last bit is fun, since...as a highly valued historical figure, he often gets credited for holding the opposite position simply because he had an argument with how aristotle formulated that same position. Modernizing his position to fit what we would expect of a vry smrt prsn. Exactly the same thing we do when we hear that some fucking nutter believed that the earth was round, as if it must be based on their greater intelligence and the value of their positions, or the community to which they belonged. Plato, for example, offered no justification. He just mentioned that some people believed that it was, ipse dixit, and this was likely not based on anything other than homers flat disc...with the added concepts of the stars in their dome above, the underworlds dome below....and how "perfect" such a form would be. A common mythological cosmology for the region.
Most of christendom (and everyone else) then, like most of christendom today, continued to believe in the traditional..and very wrong..things in their magic books. Those things were the cultural inheritance of pagan influences in proto christianity (a category that plato and his thoughts also belonged to), which surrounded them on all sides, as well as coming from within. Even within the very, very limited field of proto christian academia, we have no end of examples of the shamans in charge of important groups arguing for, and yes..being argued against, on the subject of a flat earth.
There is seemingly no end to the excuses you will make for other peoples superstitions, and their history.
Continuing further, for the non apologists - the earliest positions on a spherical earth weren't actually all that enlightened or based on clear thinking either. Many were derived arbitrarily from some other set of myths or ideals, and even the people who held them had trouble understanding how it was that the earth could be round - how there could be people opposite and under, or why the water "above" didn't drain away and "down" to that other side, or completely away.
They resorted, in nearly every case, to god-magic as an explanation for all of this. It's understandable, given their place in time and lack of fundamental knowledge required to comprehend those ideas we find so simple and self evident today that we teach them to five year olds. As sagan put it, the simplest idea, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning. They simply did not possess those intermediate steps between what could be seen, and the counter-intuitive reality it described. Most got it right by accident, which isn't exactly getting it right at all.
If we wanmt to point to someone who made the case well, it would be Eratosthenes, not Plato. He had heard of a place where a stick cast no shadow at specific times. Having a good idea of the distance between alexandria and that well based on others work in the field over centuries...he then commissioned an expedition to see if that was just a rumor, and, when it wasn't, they literally walked out the distance just to check it. Using that distance and the difference between the shadows angles, he was able to make a very accurate calculation as to the circumference of the earth, and he concluded that those effects simply would not be possible if the earth were any other shape.
He was also a xenophobic bigot who thought that superior greek blood should be kept pure from that of the barbaric unter-mensch. That last bit is fun, since...as a highly valued historical figure, he often gets credited for holding the opposite position simply because he had an argument with how aristotle formulated that same position. Modernizing his position to fit what we would expect of a vry smrt prsn. Exactly the same thing we do when we hear that some fucking nutter believed that the earth was round, as if it must be based on their greater intelligence and the value of their positions, or the community to which they belonged. Plato, for example, offered no justification. He just mentioned that some people believed that it was, ipse dixit, and this was likely not based on anything other than homers flat disc...with the added concepts of the stars in their dome above, the underworlds dome below....and how "perfect" such a form would be. A common mythological cosmology for the region.
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