Wow. For those of you who thought that the so-called Intelligent Design folks weren't sufficiently divorced from any form of scientific rigor: here is a bunch of folks who are sticking with the geocentric model of the solar system.
Here is a particularly ... interesting quote:
Solar and lunar "declinations"The earth is NOT TILTED 23.45°degrees....It is UPRIGHT as God created man to walk UPRIGHT. The tilted earth probably came from Galileo as he looked through the telescope and saw that some of the planets were tilted in their orbits around the sun. A tilted EARTH could be an explanation for the seasons, he reasoned, as people were still apt to ask difficult questions about the reason for the seasons!!
So, it does look like they at least concede that the earth is spherical, as opposed to a flat surface. Therefore, does this mean that only someone at the north pole is standing upright? People in the southern hemisphere are therefore upside down to various degrees?
Some of this seems to come from a sort of cognitive inflexibility: it's sort of like they can't realize that, even in the view that they propose, that one could consider what the universe would look like from a different vantage point. Consider this: you are on a large cruise ship that is moving east. You happen to be walking west on the ship at a certain speed. In which direction are you moving? It depends on whether you describe it from the vantage point of your motion relative to the ship or the earth. Is it that much freaking harder to see that you could extend that to describing your motion relative to other points in the universe?
The site reads like a parody. Maybe it is.
Oh yeah, they have another page claiming that the New World really should be called New Cabotia because John Cabot was the first European to land on the actual continent. Just one silly point: what about the people that were already here? Yes, we can discuss which was the first European to land here, and what does it mean to discover a location, but none of the Europeans were the first human beings here. (You know, stuff still counts, even when it isn't done by white heterosexual Christian males. ;)
Hmm, the main beef on the page seems to be that the discovery of the US was by a predominantly Catholic country. I love how they rant about Rome trying to steal the New World from Cabot/England. Again, what about the folks who were already living there?
Actually, that reminds of the Oscar Wilde quote about America having been discovered many times before Christopher Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Dang, I wish I knew if the site was for real, or just a wonderfully zany parody.
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