So I have a born again christian family member in their mid twenties who stated with complete confidence that there is a dome in the sky called the firmament and beyond it is where heaven is. She believes space doesn’t exist and rockets just blow up because the bible said so. She is not the brightest and normally I would let this sort of nonsense go but I work in aerospace and have multiple pieces of hardware in space so she is either calling me ignorant or a malicious agent for the devil purposely lying for her so I got pretty annoyed. I can’t find anything about this dome in a google search about religion and I suspect she ended up on a flat-earth YouTube channel that twisted a line in the bible to fit their beliefs and didn’t actually get it from her church. I know its probably hopeless to help her understand how dumb and frankly insulting this belief is but I can possibly talk some reason if I understand the source.
Are there any major or minor religions, christian or other that believe space is a lie and only god is outside our atmosphere?
friendly reminder that these people vote
So. the firmament is a thing.
Mostly these days, it’s considered to be allegory, as apposed to firm fact. but people- typically Young Earth Creationist types- will insist the english-translated bible is the absolute word of god meant to be taken absolutely literally. (and will reject things like aging and dino bones because it was made to look that way. for some reason.)
there are some middle-ground type people who espoused a belief that there was a solid shell of ice- the firmament- and that it melted to create the cataclysm written of Noah’s flood to explain why it wasn’t there, but was there before.
They, uh, also tend to go in for a flat earth.
Watch out people!! Found another agent of Satan!! Let us pray to Baby Jesus!! 🙏
I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo tshirt, cause it says like, I wanna be formal but I’m here to party too. I like to party, so I like my Jesus to party.
So she insists she believes the word says the world is spherical but that there is a dome in the sky. I think she got bored halfway through the video after they stopped talking about the stuff from the bible. I see that the firmament is real but as someone who was raised catholic I assumed all religions agreed that it was a metaphysical barrier between heaven and earth. After reading through the comments here I feel like she probably got this from YouTube/ticktock and not from her church.
I believe the ice wall thing was a theory proposed by Kent Hovind. Pretty sure he is/was in jail for tax evasion or something? When I was a teenager I ate his young earth creationist stuff up like candy.
Edit: I am aware that the firmament is a thing for a very long time, but I believe Hovind took that idea and proposed it as the reason for his flood and age of the earth theory.
This was roughly the early cosmology of Judaism, but even by Jesus’s time was being abandoned. For example, the Greeks and Romans were familiar enough with both lunar eclipses and the Earth being round that the generally accepted explanation for lunar eclipses was that the Earth was eclipsing the sun and casting a shadow on the moon, which we know was popular because in De Rerum Natura Lucretius appeals to keep more of an open mind as that might not be the only explanation (meaning it was commonly enough endorsed that it was nearly considered the sole explanation in Lucretius’s circles).
This may even connect to the description of the three hour “crucifixion darkness” in the earliest copies of Luke where it is explained as being caused by the sun being eclipsed. That language is changed in later versions, and the language of ‘eclipse’ was criticized by early church commentators given that solar eclipses were known to be impossible on a full moon (such as Passover) and only last around 8 minutes.
But what’s often overlooked was that being written after 50 CE, visible nighttime lunar eclipses whose previous Saros cycle eclipses were during the daytime (and not visible) in the 30s CE would have allowed the latter to be trivially calculated by astronomers of the time.
Lunar eclipses take 3 hours, and have a 1 in 6 chance of occurring on Passover. We even know there was a daytime lunar eclipse on Passover of 33 CE, whose subsequent Saros cycle eclipse was visible in both Judea and Greece before any of the Synoptic gospels were written.
So not only was some of the anti-firmament cosmology known by the era of the New Testament, it’s quite possible that there was even originally text reflecting both knowledge the earth was round and that lunar eclipses are caused by the earth eclipsing the sun in the New Testament, but it may have been subsequently removed because later editors failed to realize the event was not an eyewitness testimony but a calculated celestial event and thus dismissed it as erroneously describing an impossible solar eclipse.
TL;DR: Your family member is nearly going pre-NT with the commitment to that cosmology there.
Amazingly thorough ! Nice ! I’ve encountered many flerfs talking about the firmament but never really wondered where that idea could have come from.
What wasn’t reasoned into her head, can’t be reasoned out.
Sounds like there’s a good chance that you may need to apply a method I use when dealing people who believe in conspiracy theories. It’s largely a psychological thing, and it has very little to do with proof, evidence, logic, reasoning and science. No amount of evidence is ever going to solve a problem that is psychological in nature. Religious cults and conspiracy groups share some characteristics, so maybe this is applicable in her case too.
The idea is that people believe in crazy BS because that makes them a member of a group. That gives them an identity and makes them feel like they’re a privileged group for knowing some “hidden truth” about something. It also produces an “us against them” dynamic between the in-group and the out-group. Many individuals in these groups also have sub-clinical psychosis, narcissism or paranoia accompanied by anxiety and loneliness. This setup means that they find these BS nonsense groups appealing, and that the misguided beliefs become essentially bullet proof. Fighting against these beliefs will only make them stronger.
These people need therapy more than evidence.
So what’s your method? I don’t think you ever actually spelled it out in the comment unless you meant sending them to therapy, which isn’t a bad idea.
Forget all the evidence and facts. Provide psychological support instead.
They’ll just consider psychological help as brainwash attempt and reject the help.
There’s no help for them. It’s sad really.
the idea that NO ONE is truly at the helm and we’re all just stumbling through the world is absolutely terrifying to some people.
What’s hilarious to me is once I had this realization it was so relieving. I fucking hated the idea of me having to suck up to some asshole sky daddy just because I had the audacity to be born.
Absolutely. Fear and uncertainty are a huge part of many conspiracy theories. It’s actually quite human to be uncomfortable with uncertainty.
However, in the case of Conspiratorial Thinking (CT), that uncertainty just goes wild and the person in question will seek out unorthodox methods to cope with it. Even if the explanation is complete BS, it’s still more comforting than having no explanation at all. It’s comforting and appealing, but it does not solve the underlying problem, and that’s why people with CT have a hard time getting back to normal thinking.
The world is big, scary and full of complex interactions. If you can come up with a miserably flimsy excuse of an explanation that will at least calm you down, you’re absolutely going to hold on to it. Humans are pretty bad at tolerating uncertainty, and some people will feel absolutely devastated in the face of global economic turmoil and political unrest. Some people will go to great lengths to mitigate uncertainty, and resorting to CT isn’t even the most extreme example of this behavior.
I’m confused, can you describe the method you use directly? my only tool for dealing with people like this is ignoring them and cutting contact, it’d be nice to have some tools in case it happens to someone I actually like
These people might be in a vulnerable spot, so help and support are the types of things they really need. Be a human to another human. Provide social interaction, friendship and understanding.
Facts and debate will only push them further away from reality and deeper into a fantasy realm of their own. They find it appealing, but it won’t actually address their problems.
Interesting, because it seems that lack of identity and hobbies is causing this. It is like when people become fan of product such as sport teams, a car manufacturer, an operating system so they can feel included.
The difference is, the low fee entry to believe systems, you don’t need to think or spend money, just listen or watch YouTube videos.
Maybe OP need to take these family members to join club or something else where they replace this passive lifestyle with a little bit active one.
That’s true. The feeling of community plays an important part in many conspiracy theories. Humans are social animals, so social interaction is essential for wellbeing. If you’re lonely, you’ll naturally crave for a sense of community, and that’s exactly what many conspiracy theories will provide. Alternatively, you could build a kite and go to the nearest park and talk to all the other people flying their kites, but it’s a lot easier to watch conspiracy videos and join those forums.
On top of that, there’s a strong sense of in-group vs. out-group. That’s basically just a modern version of tribalism. It’s the usual “us against them” setup all over again.
Like others have said, this is flat earther stuff. A lot of Christian evangelical types question things like the Big Bang and how old the universe/Earth really are, but afaik there isn’t an entire religion with this as a belief.
I used to work at a space museum and we would get Christian folks who would sometimes argue with us over the number that was on the sign telling them the age of our Moon rock, but never that the earth was flat. If that is a thing, it must be new.
Questioning The Big Bang is somewhat ironic, as it was initially Georges Lemaître, a physicist and Catholic Priest who was the outlier.
That’s why I specifically said Evangelicals.
Here is just one example:
Deutsch gained notoriety in late 2005 and early 2006, when it was reported that he had instructed a NASA website designer to add the word “theory” after every occurrence of the phrase Big Bang.[1] In his memo to the website designer, Deutsch wrote that the Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion… It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator… This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue.” The memo also noted that the AP Stylebook calls for the usage of the phrase “Big Bang theory”.[1]
Prior to the 2004 Bush/Cheney presidential campaign, Deutsch had been a student at Texas A&M University. His NASA résumé falsely asserted that he had a B.A. degree in journalism, but in February 2006 a blogger at The Scientific Activist discovered that he had never graduated.[2] This was subsequently confirmed by Texas A&M, and Deutsch resigned from NASA.[3] Deutsch later returned to Texas A&M and completed his degree that year.[4]
James E. Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and several other career NASA scientists and public affairs officials had been interviewed by The New York Times in January 2006. In these interviews, they complained about “intensifying efforts by political appointees in NASA, including Deutsch, to control more closely” the content of their public statements.[5] Deutsch, speaking to the New York Times, gave his opinion that Hansen had exaggerated the threat of global warming. He denied lying to NASA about his college degree.[5]
Didn’t they just find things that suggest it’s 4 million years older? Heh.
