X-Message-Number: 24203
From: "michaelprice" <>
References: <>
Subject: Flat Earth : was Re: Markets and reality 
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 13:01:53 +0100

Actually the using the flat-Earth belief as an argument against the
value of market-based ideas doesn't work, for the simple
reason that people in medieval times did NOT believe the Earth
to be flat.  This is a 19th century myth, based in a painting showing
Columbus arguing his case before the Spanish Inquisition, er,
theologians, which Washington Irving and others fictionalised,
and has been accepted as fact ever since.

The myth of the Flat Earth is a itself myth

From http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm
"the invention of the flat Earth myth can be laid at the feet of Washington
Irving, who included it in his historical novel on Columbus, and the wider
idea that the everyone in the Middle Ages was deluded has been widely
accepted ever since."
And from
http://www.id.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/RUSSELL/FlatEarth.html
"
It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no
educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third
century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat.
[.........]
The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an
American, between whom I have not been able to establish a connection,
though they were both in Paris at the same time. One was Antoine-Jean
Letronne (1787-1848), an academic of strong antireligious prejudices who had
studied both geography and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to
misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing
in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers
(1834). The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington
Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of
history. His misrepresentations of the history of early New York City and of
the life of Washington were topped by his history of Christopher Columbus
(1828). It was he who invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus,
a "simple mariner," appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors
and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed,
according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate. Well, yes, there
was a meeting at Salamanca in 1491, but Irving's version of it, to quote a
distinguished modern historian of Columbus, was "pure moonshine. Washington
Irving, scenting his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene,"
created a fictitious account of this "nonexistent university council" and
"let his imagination go completely...the whole story is misleading and
mischievous nonsense."
"

Cheers,
Michael C Price
http://mcp.longevity-report.com
http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm

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