Columbus and his contemporaries knew the Earth was round.

Many believe that Christopher Columbus proved that the Earth was round. This is because everyone thought the Earth was flat at the time. This is absolutely false. People knew the Earth was round in ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Medieval Christians also knew this fact.

So how did this concept enter common knowledge? It not only became commonly known but it is ingrained in people’s idea of how America was discovered and how idiotic those damn Christians are. That is by design. The myth was marketed to the public to discredit Christians to promote Darwinism at the turn of the 20th Century.

Washington Irving wrote a book called The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828. In this book he published a fictitious account of how Columbus got his commission to sale to Asia. In his account hard line Christians disapproved of his idea the earth was spherical because of scriptural accounts the Earth was flat. This is not the case.

The reason Columbus had issues with his commission to find the east coast of Asia was because Columbus believed the earth was much smaller than it really is. Columbus used a shorter degree length and thought that Japan was located where the Caribbean is actually located. The people he wanted to fund the trip knew that Japan was much further away.

In the next few years Jean Antoine Letronne and William Whewell both added to the idea. Letronne misrepresented the church ideas and Whewellfound obscure figures to prove that it was a commonly held belief. In the late 1800s Camille Flammarion a woodcut, L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire, that depicted a a medieval person on a flat earth poking their head out of the atmosphere. This was then circulated as an authentic 16th Century woodcut.

When Darwinist theory was first starting to get traction, obviously their was a lot of hostility between Darwinists and Christians. The Flat Earth Myth was used to discredit Christians as scientific morons. It became a great ad hominem attack on Christians. Don’t listen to them. They think the earth is flat.

Many I am sure think that this type of attack is fine if you are on the right side of the argument. Obviously the pro-Darwin marketers needed to get the truth of evolution out and had to cut through the church. Which ever way you feel about Darwin, this tactic is wrong. There is no difference between this, changing history, and not allowing slaves to learn to read. The Darwinists were mostly academics and had access to the education system.

They used that influence to muddy the common thought to push through their belief. No matter how right you think that belief maybe, this is reeducation and leads to some very bad times in world history. These same ideas spawned eugenics. Humans have a basic right to free thought. When you deprive them that right you start to bring consequences of ignorance. Many who think that there was no problem here would denounce the early medieval church and its war on old Roman thought.

More reading on this disinformation can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology