[Buddha-l] Re: flat earth?

[curt]

It turns out there is now a new book just on this topic: "Flat Earth: 
The History of an Infamous Idea" by Christine Garwood (at amazon: 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-History-Infamous-Idea/dp/140504702X ).

Here's an interesting review of the book: 
http://thevanitypress.blogspot.com/2007/05/flat-earth.html

"Garwood spends a little while at the outset establishing something that 
those of us who study the Middle Ages already know, but that the general 
reader might not know: namely, that the flat Earth is not a medieval 
idea. Every educated person in the Middle Ages knew that the Earth was a 
sphere; this idea had first been proposed by the Pythagoreans in the 6th 
century BC, had been picked up by Plato and Aristotle, passed to Ptolemy 
and Boethius, and gotten entrenched into Western Christianity by the 
church fathers. The early church fathers like Jerome and Augustine did 
not read the Bible literally, and were generally friendly towards the 
best scientific knowledge of their day."

Of course everyone makes mistakes. But I cannot help returning to the 
delicious irony of Stephen Batchelor uncritically repeating this bit of 
misinformation whilst demanding that Buddhists (sorry, "Dharma 
practitioners") stop believing things uncritically.  However widespread 
the misconceptions about "flat-earth theory" might be - the truth has 
always been easy to find for anyone who has any intellectual curiosity 
about what pre-modern scientists actually said and knew. Isaac Asimov 
went on at length about this very point in his book "The Universe: From 
Flat Earth To Quasars" which was first published in 1966.

- Curt