Flat Earth

Ever wonder why the old Christian church fought so hard against the concept of a round earth?

It's a tragedy, because it was a fight that never had to happen, based on ideas that had no basis in the Bible.

Many people in antiquity actually believed that the Earth was round and bounded by a wall of fire near the Equator. Beyond that impassible wall was a portion of Earth called the Anti-podes. Some of the ancients believed that people lived there, on its bottom half, hanging upside down. To their credit, some of the medieval Christians scoffed at such a bizzare idea. However, they threw the baby out with the bath water. No topsy-turvy people down there -- no people at all, no people possible, because they could not be sons of Adam living trapped behind that wall of fire, beyond the reach of the gospel.

Rather than dump the idea of a ring of fire, which had no basis in scripture, they trashed the idea of a round Earth instead, which scripture doesn't preclude.

Hoopla in the Heavens

I sat in my car, this morning, waiting on a certain work assignment, surrounded by welcome rain and enjoying Boorstin's "The Discoverers." I stopped short at a fascinating paragraph.

Somewhere in extant Babylonian literature that I somehow missed on my journey through it, is the story of how El, the great god, grew jealous of the bright lion that passed nightly across the sky, and smote it each day as the morning began.

The lion, of course, would be the planet Venus, the "morning star," which vanishes each day as the light returns.

Boorstin believes the Hebrews borrowed that myth, giving the smiting power to their own God and converting the sky-lion into The Light Bringer (Latin: Lucifer) who is made synonymous with Satan.

As in the famous Isaiah passage (chapter 14) from the Bible:

"How art thou fallen, O Lucifer,
son of the morning!
...For thou hast said in thine heart,
I will ascend into heaven ... "

I really don't want to get into a discussion about the reality or non-reality of The Evil One. But it is curious that in the Hebrew world, the aforementioned planet and associated sky-being, would be masculine and horribly evil; and if not so despicable in the alleged Babylonian original, still an affront to deity.

Whereas in the western world, the same celestial phenomenon was considered Feminine and delightful -- Venus/Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love.

An angry ark

"And they of Bethshemesh were reaping their wheat harvest in the valley: and they lifted up their eyes, and saw the ark and rejoiced to see it." -- 1 Samuel 6:13.

With this beautiful and descriptive passage, the Bible narrates the return of theArk of the Covenant to Israel after its kidnapping by Philistines.

But those happy wheat farmers might not have been so eager to get the thing back had they known what was coming:

"And [God] smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men and the people lamented, because the Lord had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter."

50,070 people? Did they die all at once, in some explosive burst of divine wrath? Get zapped one by one like ants being squished by an invisible hand? Or go home and have dinner and go to bed, never to awaken in the morning? And that is sure a lot of people for one little city in that day and age, seems to me.

Other cultures have had their holy relics, even protected them with taboos and such, but none have had such an odd treasure, with such deadly and delicate sensibilities.

And then, after being so potent for so many years, the ark just mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again, except in the mind of a Hollywood filmmaker.