99kk:
This got me thinking, damn
NOOOOOO.
NO.
No.
Okay, if you don’t want to read this rant, that’s fine. But I swear, this is not a fundamentalist Christian rant about how the Bible is all-inclusive truth. This is a rant about actual historical fact. That said, NOOOO. If you don’t believe in the contents of the Bible or the Torah or the Qu'ran or any other book ever, I don’t care, that’s your prerogative, as long as you’re not a dick about it. But this here? This is a bad reason to not believe in something. This is a bad reason to do ANYTHING.
Why, you ask?
Because no culture ever thought the world was flat. EVER.
Of course they did, foolish girl, everyone knows that Columbus proved the world was round, you say.
No, no one ever thought the world was flat, I promise. Columbus thought the world was much smaller than it actually was, thus how he managed to edit out the entirety of the Americas. (He was also a murdering, pillaging dick, besides being stupid, but that’s another rant.) The queen of Portugal, arguing with him, didn’t say that he’d fall off the edge of the world, she said that the Greeks measured the circumference of the Earth, like, thousands of years before. And the Greeks were kind of held up as all-knowing omnipotent philosophy demigods (science was a part of philosophy for a long time), so everyone (except Columbus, but we don’t care about him) believed they were right. And they were actually damn close, so, you know, respect.
Well, you huff in irritation, the Catholic Church said that people believed the Earth was flat, and they were the predominant power in the Western world for so long that it MUST be true. There’s no way that many people could be wrong about something that the whole world believed, you point out fairly logically.
Two things about that. First of all, no one who ever saw the ocean or even a reasonably large plain could believe the world was flat, because the horizon moves and therefore (logically) the world CAN’T be flat, which everyone at the time intuitively figured out. And if you live on a mountain you can actually SEE the curvature of the Earth in places, so there’s that. A few individuals might have believed it, might have even scraped together some followers, but anyone with half a brain went “…nah, bro, definitely round.”
Second of all, the Catholic Church, like any other business, was MOST concerned with hanging onto their control. So they arranged events to work in their favor, and when things seemed disinclined to work in their favor, they just changed the way people thought. Those pesky heathen Druidic folks in the Celtic Isles causing a problem? Not to worry, they sacrifice children to their bloodthirsty gods! (They didn’t. The Norse gods were the ones with the liking for human sacrifice, especially Odin–there was a yearly festival where they hung nine animals on nine trees, and one animal was a man.) Those problematic Jews and Muslims impinging on your Empire? Don’t fret, they cause plague! (They didn’t. Actually countries with a lot of Jewish refugees were much LESS plague ridden because the Jews had this novel idea of bathing regularly.) Those Protestants (and athiests, although in the Middle Ages those were few and far between, relatively speaking) causing issues with their radical thoughts of not paying massive amounts of money to protect their immortal soul? Don’t even give it another thought, they’re all morons who believe the world is flat. (They, shockingly, did not. Because that’s stupid.)
So, long story short, by believing that this bumper sticker is legit vis a vis not being Christian, you are using centuries-old propaganda against your own perspective by the Catholic Church as an excuse not to believe in the Catholic Church. It’s bad thinking, sloppily executed, and anyone with an ounce of sense would have realized, but everyone sort of bought into it because, as you so accurately pointed out in our little theoretical debate, the Catholic Church was sort of all-controlling in the Western world. No one ever thought the world was flat, it was just the Catholics trying to keep their control.
If you don’t believe me, I’m not really in the mood to tag hundreds of articles, but if you go to the bottom of the linked Wiki article, there are plenty. (x)
(Source: nikolakh-pou-eisai, via bleedingwillow96)
