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Author Topic: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos  (Read 47135 times)

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patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #91 on: June 11, 2020, 10:23:12 am »

https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2020/june/conspiracy-theories-engaging-online-and-wisdom-intersection.html







Conspiracy Theories, Engaging Online, and Wisdom: The Intersection of the Three and How to Respond Biblically










While social media offers amazing opportunities to connect and learn, it seems that every new day brings new stories of awfulness.


One of the things I love about living in a major city like Chicago is that if I miss the train into the city I don’t have to wait long for the next one. Unfortunately, the same is true of examples of bad behavior on social media. While social media offers amazing opportunities to connect and learn, it seems that every new day brings new stories of awfulness. Baptizing the quote often ascribed to Churchill: the greatest argument against humanity’s inherent goodness is five minutes scrolling through the average social media feed.

In recent months this tendency has only increased. Since Ed and I wrote an editorial for the Dallas Morning News on the importance of church leaders’ discipling their people on social media habits, multiple controversies have erupted. Most often these have revolved around conspiracy theories being promoted about the motivations and actions of the protests.

Given the enduring importance of conspiracy theories, I want to circle back to some of the criticism of the DNS article before focusing on few preliminary suggestions on how Christians can begin to think through healthy online habits.

The Problem of the Media

Several responses to my article in the Dallas Morning News pointed out that their suspicion of mainstream media outlets often arises from clear incidents of bias in their reporting. This is fair criticism.

The reality is that the state of reporting on religion—and particularly in reporting on evangelicalism—is quite poor. Major outlets get obvious facts wrong about simple beliefs that betrays both a lack of knowledge about the material they’re reporting on and a laziness to not search out the answer.

Google examples of where outlets have tried to define “Calvinism” and you’ll find answers that range from simplistic to malicious caricatures. It is not hard to pick up the phone and call a pastor or seminary professor for help, but this is somehow deemed not important.

More distressingly, some outlets seem intent upon pointing to outliers as examples of evangelical behavior while ignoring the wide majority. This was evident in March when outlets focused on churches and pastors who defied shelter-at-home orders and tried to pawn miracle cures for the virus.

Literally thousands of pastors led the way on closing their churches and serving their communities, often at significant personal loss, but these were obscured.

Going Too Far

What becomes problematic is when critics of the mainstream media use these examples to push Christians to dismiss all journalism. This is often to the benefit of fringe, sometimes religiously-informed news outlets who feed a narrative that Christians are victims of a conspiracy and only they hold the truth.

Having acknowledged the failures in journalism, it is critical that Christians resist the temptation to reject mainstream reporting altogether. This is a critical mistake that leads us down the pathway to isolation whereby we invalidate any news article we find unfavorable.

Moreover, there are good journalists in major outlets, even religion journalists who strive to understand and report on evangelicalism in all fairness. At times, this leads them to our failures, but in other cases they want to detail the nuance and complexity within the movement. I might not always agree with them, but I respect their integrity and desire to report honestly.

This all-or-nothing mentality also suggests a poor understanding of Christian engagement. Our goal should be a maturity to engage the new reporting of our time with a critical eye rather than to shout bias upon seeing the outlet logo. We need to read critically across a wide range, accepting hard truths that are well supported rather than if they support our political or cultural narrative. We need to resist our temptations to echo chambers; a temptation that is common to many other subcultures across the globe.

Taking Steps

One of the frustrating takeaways from articles on social media is how they can often have great data or insights on to why and how our online platforms are useful and/or destructive but they can leave the reader at a dead end. After outlining the problem, they can often leave people with little insight into how to respond.

Even as they seem indispensable, social media platforms are new and healthy habits remain unclear. In this respect, I believe that the book of James offers a few preliminary insights in thinking through our online presence.

Lesson One: Is Christ Lord of your social media?

At first glance, this is an easy question. Anyone who’s gone through Sunday School will be quick to say that Christ is Lord. Indeed, their social media profile says “Christian” and likely includes a bible verse or two. But Christ being Lord of your social media is less a matter of what your profile says and more a matter of what you say and how you relate to others.

Just like wearing WWJD bracelets in the 1990s did not qualify, social media profiles can be misleading and even destructive if the heart behind them is not submitted to Christ.

In the Dallas Morning News piece, I paraphrased James 3:11-12 in saying that out of the same social media account cannot come professions of the risen Christ and accusations of #pizzagate. My point was, building on James, that Christians need to recognize that they cannot separate their Christian witness from their political posts.

How we speak to one another, the kinds of stories we elevate, and the language we choose all flow out of this question of lordship.

Lesson Two: Ask for Wisdom

I love that James opens with the encouragement for Christians to ask for wisdom. That James leaves it opened ended (“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God…”) is designed to provoke in the heart of the believer the obvious response that we all lack wisdom.

Indeed, later in James the author circles back to this this theme: “Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth.”

In a climate where truth is often secondary, we would do well to ask God for wisdom in navigating not only what we should read but what we should post. Moreover, we need to recognize how our casualness regarding the truth and brash arrogance are symptoms of rebellion not qualities to be admired. If you are uncertain during this time, bring your need before God in prayer.

Into this, James reminds us that God “gives generously to all without reproach.” If you are struggling to know who to listen to, start with prayer.

Lesson Three: Hit Pause

One of the central lessons of James that social media tends to warp is the importance of being “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” (1:19). The pace of our news cycles and our exchanges make it nearly impossible to hold off. We think it’s necessary to let others see how angry we are about something someone did or said.

Even as my column encouraged Christians to hear this encouragement and hit pause, it is stunning how quickly we can rush past James’ warning and fire away on social media.

Long ago, my father taught me one of the most valuable lessons when email was still relatively new: never send an angry email. Save it in your drafts and pray on it for at least 24 hours. I currently have dozens of saved emails from the past decade that I wrote in anger but held off on sending.

In some cases, God resolved the situation without my anger; in others, he gave me peace despite a lack of resolution. In every case, I realized that the email would only satisfy my rage and they remain in my drafts as testimonies to the wisdom in James.

It is critical that we understand that just because we’re behind a screen, this does not absolve us from James’ warning regarding anger. Instead, let me encourage you to adopt a similar practice as with my emails: if you’re going to tweet or post something in anger, bitterness, or mean spiritedness, save in your drafts and give it 24 hours.

Let God’s Spirit speak to you about whether the situation really needs this message. At its core, this willingness to submit our anger to God’s voice is a testament that, going back to lesson one, Christ is the Lord of our social media.

Andrew MacDonald is associate director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center Institute.

patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #92 on: June 12, 2020, 11:49:59 am »

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #93 on: June 19, 2020, 10:42:20 am »

patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #94 on: June 20, 2020, 03:02:12 am »
« Last Edit: June 20, 2020, 03:57:13 am by patrick jane »

patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #95 on: June 29, 2020, 06:41:19 pm »
In other news, the "quantum cube-sat network" keeps pushing forward...


9 minutes

patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #96 on: July 19, 2020, 08:43:45 pm »

patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #97 on: August 07, 2020, 07:31:52 am »

patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #98 on: August 10, 2020, 07:44:44 am »

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #99 on: August 22, 2020, 12:03:49 pm »
A New Blue Marble
JULY 20, 2015 AT 12:04 PM ET BY SCOTT KELLY


https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/07/20/new-blue-marble

https://medium.com/@ObamaWhiteHouse/a-new-blue-marble-39c2fe1b5b3c

Summary: NASA releases its new "Blue Marble" photo -- the first such photo since 1972, and the first of many more to come later this year.


Ed. note: This is cross-posted on Medium.

No one on this planet had ever seen a whole picture of the Earth until 1972.

We knew we lived on it, and had a vast amount of useful information about its makeup, its processes, and its place in the solar system. At the time, some of the most insightful individuals had begun to understand that we, the people who live on Earth, actually had the ability to influence the processes taking place on our planet.

But it was hard for many people to grasp this concept. It seemed abstract, distant, hard to visualize.

Enter “Blue Marble”:




It was the first full photo of the Earth, taken on December 7, 1972, by the American crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. The original Blue Marble is thought by many to be the most-reproduced image of all time.


What made the Blue Marble so special? Sure, it might have been the first full photo of the Earth that we took, but we’ve taken a bunch more since then.

Like this one.



And this one.




And this one.



So why is the “Blue Marble” a bigger deal than these? Turns out, it’s quite tricky to take a good photo of the entire Earth.

The first challenge is that our planet is big. The only way to view all of it at once is to get much farther away from the Earth than we do for many of our activities in outer space. The International Space Station, for instance, orbits at a height of just 400 kilometers, or about 249 miles away from Earth.

The second problem is a familiar one that plagues many photographers who are Earthbound: lighting. In order to view the Earth as a fully illuminated globe, a person (or camera) must be situated in front of it, with the sun directly at his or her back. Not surprisingly, it can be difficult to arrange this specific lighting scheme for a camera-set up that’s orbiting in space at speeds approaching thousands of miles per hour.

As a result of these challenges, NASA, NOAA, and other science agencies most often rely on composite images to depict our planet. These images stitch together multiple high-resolution snapshots taken by satellites already in orbit to produce one seamless portrait of the Earth. And that’s what the three photos above are: composite images produced by NASA over the past fifteen years (released respectively in 2002, 2007, and 2012).

Composite imaging is an extremely useful tool for helping people understand the Earth — they allow researchers to capture certain features at higher resolution; reduce the obscuring effect of cloud coverage in certain areas; and overlay various data layers to help identify patterns and trends. Composites can result in some truly remarkable images, like this “Black Marble,” which, by stitching together multiple views of the planet, shows a full global view of the Earth’s city lights.



But there’s something remarkable about a single snapshot of the Earth — an intact view of our planet in its entirety, hanging in space.

Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan explained:

“…you’re looking at the most beautiful star in the heavens — the most beautiful because it’s the one we understand and we know, it’s home, it’s people, family, love, life — and besides that it is beautiful. You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there’s no strings holding it up, and it’s moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception.”

That’s why today, I am excited to see that NASA has released its new Blue Marble, the first of many more to come later this year.



This Blue Marble is the first fully illuminated snapshot of the Earth captured by the DSCOVR satellite, a joint NASA, NOAA, and U.S. Air Force mission. After launching in February 2015, DSCOVR spent months rocketing away from Earth before reaching its final orbit position in June 2015 at Lagrange point 1 (L1), about one million miles away from Earth. (A Lagrange point, in case you were wondering, is “a position where the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the centripetal force required for a small object to move with them.” For our purposes, that means that a Lagrange point is a spot at which a satellite can maintain a fixed position relative to the Earth.)



The DSCOVR mission serves several important purposes, including providing scientific data on heat and radiation fluxes across the Earth’s atmosphere, and maintaining the nation’s ability to provide timely alerts and forecasts for space weather events, which can disrupt telecommunications capabilities, power grids, GPS applications, and other systems vital to our daily lives and national and local economies.

And with its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (which has an epic acronym. Seriously. It’s EPIC), DSCOVR will capture and transmit full images of the Earth every few hours! The information gathered by EPIC will help us examine a range of Earth properties, such as ozone and aerosol levels, cloud coverage, and vegetation density, supporting a number of climate science applications.

One of the best parts of this mission is that NASA will make all of the data, data products, and images collected by DSCOVR freely available to the public, including the new “Blue Marble” images. Later this year, you’ll be able to view and download new “Blue Marble” images taken by DSCOVR every day.

In addition to providing useful data to scientists and researchers, these images will remind all of us that we live on a planet, in a solar system, in a universe. And that we are not just Americans, but citizens of Earth.

patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #100 on: August 23, 2020, 11:52:26 pm »

patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #101 on: August 29, 2020, 06:41:28 pm »

Wayne Gabler

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #102 on: September 02, 2020, 07:09:18 pm »
Does the mileage fit the flat earth model? The distance in the south seas flat earth map do not match the speed records of the racing yachts.
« Last Edit: September 02, 2020, 07:15:10 pm by patrick jane »
Funny Funny x 1 View List

patrick jane

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Re: Biblical Flat Earth and Cosmos
« Reply #103 on: September 02, 2020, 07:16:10 pm »
Post that in the Can you Debunk flat earth Thread

 

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