{"id":2033,"date":"2022-10-10T10:02:34","date_gmt":"2022-10-10T14:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2033"},"modified":"2022-10-10T10:02:34","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T14:02:34","slug":"a-new-world-of-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/10\/10\/a-new-world-of-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"A New World of Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>.

Like most kids, I grew up hearing that Christopher Columbus was the man who bravely stood up to the religious superstitions of the Dark Ages.
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Ignorant people \u2013 deceived by Catholic priests \u2013 were certain that the world was flat.\u00a0 If you sailed all the way to the edge of the Earth, your ship would plunge into the abyss.\u00a0 Thus the Church\u2019s most esteemed prelates opposed Columbus\u2019 plan to sail west across the Atlantic in search of India and the Far East, for the common-sense reason that every sailor in such an expedition would be lost.
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Columbus, however, felt certain that the Earth was round.\u00a0 And he proved it by boldly ignoring his culture\u2019s prevailing myths, choosing instead to be guided by the brighter lights of science and intellectual curiosity. \u00a0
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Therefore his name has been bestowed on two U.S. state capitals, our nation\u2019s federal governmental district (D.C.), a nation in South America, the westernmost province of Canada, and even the second Monday in October, compelling banks and post offices to close their doors to commemorate the guy who stumbled upon the New World.
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That\u2019s how the story is told.\u00a0 But it turns out to be complete rubbish.\u00a0
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To start with, Columbus had no need to \u201cprove\u201d that the Earth was round.\u00a0 The sphericity of our planet had been affirmed by the ancient Greeks at least 300 years before Christ.\u00a0 No one seriously doubted it, including major theologians like Augustine and Aquinas.\u00a0 Columbus appealed for the financial support of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish monarchial couple.\u00a0 They, like most royal figures in the 15th<\/sup> century, were commonly portrayed as holding the official \u201corb\u201d of power \u2013 that is, a golden globe<\/em> representing the Earth.
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That\u2019s not to deny that a few people still clung to the notion that the Earth was flat.\u00a0 A few people still believe that today, including an outspoken point guard for the NBA\u2019s Brooklyn Nets.\u00a0
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Columbus had no quarrel with the Church.\u00a0 He himself was a faithful Catholic and was confident that his voyages glorified God.\u00a0 Those who doubted the wisdom of his voyage insisted (correctly, as it turned out) that he was seriously misrepresenting the distance from Spain to Japan by sailing west. \u00a0Columbus, using fuzzy math, guessed it was about 3,000 miles.\u00a0 It was actually more than 15,000 miles.\u00a0 But that point turned out to be moot, since his progress was impeded by a hemisphere he never anticipated.\u00a0
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So how did Columbus morph into a modern pro-science hero who stood up against the embarrassing ignorance of close-minded priests?
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As Jeffrey Burton Russell documents in Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians<\/em>, it happened slowly but relentlessly in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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What Russell calls the \u201cFlat Earth Error\u201d was kickstarted by American author Washington Irving (1783-1859).\u00a0 The man who invented Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow<\/em> was devoted to the Enlightenment notion of progress \u2013 that history, properly understood, would show a steady climb from the foggy depths of mythology to the clear mountain heights of rational thinking.\u00a0 He idolized Columbus and chose to depict him as an early champion of modern values.\u00a0 \u00a0
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A number of progressive historians followed suit.\u00a0 Ironically, in their attempts to speak against the danger of believing myths, they fashioned a myth of their own \u2013 that Columbus singlehanded dispelled the fallacy of the flat Earth, something the navigator didn\u2019t believe in the first place.\u00a0
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Why do teachers, preachers, and politicians continue to tell this story, even in the teeth of clear evidence to the contrary?\u00a0
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Russell believes that part of the problem is sheer laziness.\u00a0 We\u2019ve all settled into the grooves of a certain way of seeing Columbus as a beacon of progress, and it\u2019s hard work to overturn that bias.\u00a0 \u201cOur determination to believe the Flat Error,\u201d he writes, \u201carises out of our contempt for the past and our need to believe in the superiority of the present.\u201d\u00a0
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Once certain ideas get into our heads \u2013 perhaps at an early age \u2013 it\u2019s hard to shake them.\u00a0
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That might include Mom\u2019s way of loading the dishwasher.\u00a0 And the counsel that you should always buy a used car instead of a new one.\u00a0 And the assurance that you can only trust one side of the political spectrum.\u00a0 And not-really-truisms like, \u201cGod helps those who help themselves.\u201d\u00a0
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What can we do to keep ourselves from defaulting to worn-out ideas, discredited notions, and less-than-perfect ways of seeing the world?
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Study.\u00a0 Read.\u00a0 Ask questions.\u00a0 Challenge your own convictions.\u00a0 Take a deep dive into Scripture.\u00a0 Seek new insights.\u00a0 Talk to God.
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\u201cIf any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you\u201d (James 1:5).\u00a0
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This we know for sure:\u00a0 Christopher Columbus, despite all the concerns associated with his voyage, was an exceedingly brave person.
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And we can be sure that the God of all truth will always honor the bravery of the one who seeks the truth \u2013 and is willing to follow the clues wherever they lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to this reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here. Like most kids, I grew up hearing that Christopher Columbus was the man who bravely stood up to the religious superstitions of the Dark Ages.\u00a0Ignorant people \u2013 deceived by Catholic priests \u2013 were certain that the world was flat.\u00a0 If you sailed all the way to the edge of the Earth,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2034,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[513,108],"class_list":["post-2033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-evidence","tag-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2035,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033\/revisions\/2035"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}