Welcome to The New Jerusalem!
I came across an interesting problem involving the apparent belief by
the writers of the Bible that the Earth is flat.
There are actually many references in the Bible that support this idea, and up until the Earth was proven to be a sphere, those references were commonly used by the faithful, and especially by the clergy, to 'prove' that those heretics that proposed a spherical Earth were 'Flat-Out' wrong, as God Hisself had done spelled it out quite plainly in His Holy Book for all to read and understand. Eventually, of course, all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't squish the Earth down flat again, and that was pretty much that. Except... Those doggone verses in the Bible that cannot ever change. They still plainly spell out "Flat-Earth" per God's only literary work to date, which is, per most fundamentalist Christians, incredibly infallible, even when it's absolutely, obviously wrong. Of course, there are volumes and volumes of apologetics that attempt to dismiss it all away with semantic word games, but in the end, common sense and the history of the use of these passages by devout, authoritative, religious clerics over the centuries should give you enough understanding to see through the ruse pretty easily. After being tormented by the Church and the Bible for centuries, Copernicus and Galileo can finally rest easy. I believe the rest of us should continue to remain a little nervous though. I say that because I don't want you to lose sight of why I'm putting these pages together in the first place. There are many, many, MANY people that would like very much for the United States to base it's laws on the writings of the Bible. My first question is: How much truth does the Bible contain, that we should even consider such an option? What happens if we really take a close look at it? Can it stand on it's own? Does it really have merit? This doesn't even touch on the fact that our government was intended to serve ALL American Citizens in a way that guarantees ALL of us may remain entirely FREE from ANY religious persecution, and that includes the persecution of those of any faith or even no faith at all, such as those who consider themselves agnostics, free-thinkers or even (gasp!) atheists. But I digress... On this page, we'll explore just one of those little Biblical flat-Earth problems, called The New Jerusalem. The story in Revelations goes like this:
According to John, The New Jerusalem will descend from Heaven and land on Earth. But this giant city is supposed to be in the dimensions of a perfect, Godly cube that measures 1,500 x 1,500 x 1,500 miles. "How could a cube with 6 flat sides that's 1,500 miles wide, deep and tall land on the surface of a spherical planet that's only 8,000 miles across?" you might ask. (I did...) Either the cube or the planet would have to be seriously deformed, wouldn't it?! Or... Maybe... Possibly... John thought that the Earth was flat when he dreamed the whole thing up. It's not really a big deal, other than the fact that the information in the Bible is supposed to have come through the writers from God Hisself. Of course, if it came from God Hisself, that in turn begs the question, "Why didn't God know the Earth is a sphere, like a ball - not flat, like a pancake?" (This same little problematic pop-quiz for God comes up with each of the Flat-Earth Bible dilemmas you'll find if you follow this LINK.) But wait, it gets just a little worse. If each side of the cubical New Jerusalem is a full 1,500 miles in length, then we simply apply Pythagorean Theorem and find the hypotenuse between it's opposite base corners thus: 1500² + 1500² = 2121.32² Let's simply round it off to 2,121 miles from corner to corner to make it simple, eh? At those dimensions and measurements, the corners of The New Jerusalem are some 15 miles up in the sky when it's center is touching the Earth unless, of course, the thing crushes and compacts the living hell out of everything under it to a depth of 15 miles deep! Ouch!! If it somehow were to manage to uniformly squish the Earth even half that much though, the corners are still some 7 and a half miles above the planet, while the middle edge area between the corners is still some 4 miles high. Got your ladder handy? The really tall one? Cause the 12 doors to the place are up along there somewhere. Three on each side, one for each Hebrew goat-herding tribe, remember? By the way, if you're a Christian, which Hebrew goat-herding tribe are you from? You wouldn't want to go to the wrong door. The problem reminds me of the story of the building of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in New York City. It involves the curvature of the Earth, though on a much smaller scale. It's still relevant though as an engineering problem dealing with structures that involve such large areas of the Earth's curved surface, and may help to demonstrate the problem a bit. The bridge's monumental 693 foot high towers are 1 & 5/8 inches farther apart at their tops than at their bases because the 4,260 foot distance between them made it necessary to compensate for the earth's curvature. Picture gluing two tacks to a ball, points up. Each MUST point in a different direction in space. No choice in the matter. At 2,121 miles across the base's opposite corners, The New Jerusalem engineering problem to accommodate a spherical Earth to the flat base of the structure (ignoring the fact that it is also 16,160 times taller than the bridge) is 2,629 times greater than the bridge problem engineers had to overcome for Verrazano Narrows! The apologists will no doubt inform us that even the biggest engineering problem is nothing to God, but keep in mind that this particular engineering problem amounts to making a concave spherical cube or a cubical concave sphere; a square circle with a giant bubble or a round square with a huge dimple; a straight curve maybe - get it? Even for a god, this is a logic problem that seems to be without a valid answer within the laws of physics and certainly within the 3-dimensial world we live in where this is all supposedly going to take place. Other problems involve the mass of the object itself. At the Bible-given dimensions, including thickness of the walls and materials used, the mass involved would cause it to deform in upon itself into a somewhat spherical nature, like a ball or a moon - not the cubical description given by John. On top of that, the effects of The New Jerusalem's mass interacting with the mass of the Earth would cause global destruction through world-wide earthquakes, not to mention putting a SERIOUS wobble effect into the Earth's rotation that would change climates and cause untold chaos with the Earths magnetic fields, relationship with the moon and possibly even circumnavigation of the sun. Because of it's sheer mass, it's a global killer, even if it settles slowly and softly onto the Earth's crust. With that much mass, the madness would begin before it even touched down. Using dimensions to scale, allow me to demonstrate the sizes and relationships of the objects graphically with a couple illustrations that will allow you to visualize just how BIG this Biblically proposed block of stone and gold is in comparison to planet Earth: |
Let's put The New Jerusalem right smack in the middle of America;
The Religious Right's Christian God's very most favoritest country
in the whole, wide, evil-infested world. The following map shows,
to scale, just how much land mass it would take up at 1500 miles on
each side. Note that I crushed Bush's ranch, but spared Detroit.
Not that it probably matters much anyway. He was probably in
the White House at the time, choking on a pretzel while routing for
Pat Robertson in a Celebrity Death Match Tournament on The 700 Club
and continuing his re-write of the Dictionary.
Of course, it's corners are still either 15 miles up in the sky, or it's crushed every hill, mountain, valley, stream, lake, fish, tree, human, building, town, and cow flat as a flit, while driving them all into the Earth's crust a staggering 15 miles deep which, by the way, is only a max in SOME places on the Earth of 30 miles deep to begin with. The deepest ocean is 6.78 miles deep, to give you some idea. To provide a little more perspective, Mt. McKinley is the tallest mountain the U.S. has to offer with it's peak at 20,320 feet above sea level. That's 3.8 miles high. The New Jerusalem, at 1,500 miles tall, would be nearly 400 times the height of our tallest mountain. Does that sound even remotely realistic to anyone, or do you think John simply had no idea what kind of problems physics, geology and square balls would present, since he thought the Earth was flat, and no god ever told him otherwise? Feel free to use your brain in this exercise, instead of the brains of the guys that are trying to get their religion into our politics, while relieving us of our money to support their crutches... um... I mean churches. Come to think of it, maybe we don't even need New Jerusalem to do us in. Maybe our freedoms are already about to be crushed just as badly by our own politicians. But don't you worry... It'll be for our own good, and we'll eventually learn to love it. Right after the Right gets rid of all those pesky, malcontented evil-doers that don't agree with them and God. |
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This essay generated an email discussion from a reader named Lisa.
From: Lisa
Date: November 1, 2002 Hi,
From:
Buck
Date: November 1, 2002 Hello there Lisa, Thanks for taking the time and initiative to write! You have presented a very interesting perspective, and I enjoyed your email very much! Let us examine your hypothesis. Revelations 21:16 (KJV) says, "And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal." Some further history and observations I haven't included on my 'New Jerusalem' page yet: Euclidean geometry, which got it's name from it's Greek author, Euclid, came to us from the Greeks about 300 BC. By 225 BC, Archimedes was able to use Euclidean geometry to become the first to derive the surface area and volume of a sphere in his work, "On the Sphere and Cylinder". Of course, this means that the measurements for spheres and cubes had been around for at least 350 years before John had his vision (depending on when John's vision actually took place, of course - but that's another discussion - I'll give it the benefit of the doubt here for simplicity). In any case, with Euclidean geometry a commonly accepted field of mathematics for hundreds of years in John's day by his contemporaries in the culture in which they lived (Greek), the properties of cubes, spheres and so forth were commonly known, including the measurement aspects of these objects. Spheres are, of course, measured by radius, diameter and circumference, while cubes are measured by length, width (i.e.:breadth) and height (please refer again to Revelations 21:16). A cube in those days was considered to be one of the perfect 3 dimensional shapes, from a mathematical perspective. In the discourse "Timaeus", Plato observes the geometric fact that five and only five 'regular' (a mathematical definition) geometric solids are possible. Plato mystically associates fire, earth, air, universe, and water to each regular solid, as shown below.
The
Jews and Christians embraced this idea related to the cube, in particular,
because a cube has 6 'perfect' sides, just as God created the
Earth in 6 days, according to Genesis. This idea of 'perfection'
(as something fitting of 'Godly') in application to the 'perfect' New
Jerusalem as a cube, seems to be in continuity with John's vision as
described in Revelations. From: Lisa I read your e-mail. You explained very well those
mathematical pronciples that are required to form shapes.
It reminded me of a web site I looked at on the inner core of the Earth.
I saw this on other
From: Lisa
From:
Buck Hello
again Lisa,
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