I’ve been thinking about biblical cosmology recently. I thought it might be fun if fundamentalists really did take the Bible at face value and not only embraced a 6,000 year old earth and talking snakes but also:
- a flat earth
- a geo-centric cosmos with the sun, moon, and stars moving around the earth
- a solid sky-dome with primeval waters above it. The sun, moon, and stars being this side of the sky-dome. (Thus during Noah’s flood the water came from the other side of the stars. That’s really cool!)
- the world of the dead literally under the ground
- heaven literally in the sky
And so on. That would be cool. That would put the fun back into fundamentalism.
It is so sad to watch some well-meaning fundamentalists compromising the teachings of the Bible to make them fit with modern science. All this talk of a spherical earth in Isaiah 40 and Job 26—Tosh! And all this talk of the firmament being a water canopy that collapsed in the flood is just a sell-out to the rationalist spirit of the age.
I propose we get back to the true teachings of the Bible and swell the membership of the Flat Earth Society!
(Warning: This views presented in this post do not necessarily represent those of Wipf & Stock . . . or even of the author of the post.)
October 15, 2013 at 10:43 am
This conversation: I’ve had it SO MANY TIMES.
I’m become convinced the main fundamentalist hermeneutic is “The Bible means what I want it to mean”.
Of course, that’s true for liberals too, but they’re usually honest about it anyway..
October 15, 2013 at 2:37 pm
If Genesis is literally true:
Stars are holes in the firmament
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are holes in the firmament that move
Any objects found since the discovery of the telescope (other galaxies, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, all moons of all planets besides Earth) do not exist
The moon and the sun both produce light and are probably around the same diameter
Both the sun and moon move around the Earth
The Earth is for all intents and purposes ‘flat’, but either circular or oval-shaped (Genesis does not make this clear)
The Earth is a few hundred or a few thousand miles in radius, encompassing parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
North and South America, Antarctica, and Australia do not exist
Okay, to be fair, Genesis doesn’t say all of that, but the entirety of the Hebrew scriptures makes it very plain that the Earth is not very large and the cosmos is a miniscule place compared to our current knowledge of it. So either the Genesis is literally true or Australia is real.
November 13, 2013 at 6:40 am
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