There have been some sites about this before which have always been trolling/joke sites, but this one appears to be legit.

From Wikipedia about the top-billed guy, Dr Robert Sungenis:

"In 2008, Sungenis' bishop, Kevin C. Rhoades, denounced his views of the Jewish people and Judaism as "hostile, uncharitable, and un-Christian" and required Sungenis to stop writing about them. He also directed him to stop using the word "Catholic" in his organization's name.[5] Sungenis has stated that he will only comply with Bishop Rhoades' directive to stop writing about Jews and Judaism if he is forced to do so "under the aegis of a canonical trial"."

Not only a completely ignorant dipshit but a bigoted asshole as well!

Googling the rest of these imbeciles reveals unsurprisingly that they are all right-wing lunatics, and fundamentalist Catholics.

Never let it be said that protestant evangelism has the market cornered on insane fundies.

My wife is from South Bend (site of the geocentrism conference) and I grew up 30 minutes from Greensburg, IN where Billy Lucas committed suicide. Like a double slog stomach punch to start my day. When will Indiana join the modern world?

Surely this is a joke? First "Birthers," now "Flat Earthers"? Thomas Jefferson is rolling over in his grave, sticking himself with pins.

@6 When my mom recently moved back to Indiana from Mass., and reconnected with someone she had known in highschool, the woman asked my mom how she had gotten along with all those "Jew-girls" out East....

This is for real? I thought it was an Onion headline.

Well, if it's in the Bible it's got to be true, right?

God Indiana sucks - I've lived here 5 years and while Indianapolis is fun if a bit conservative the hinterlands of the state are a freaking backwards nightmare.

I think a "Small Town Values" category as someone suggested elsewhere (to go along with "Every Child Deserves" and "Today in Traditional marriage" et al) is a great idea.

This is nothing. Yesterday I saw some news report about christian search engines that hide "sinful" sites. Not only that; they have an agenda (e.g., search for "gay marriage" and only get anti-marriage equality results; search for the Democrats and get websites on Marxism). THAT is a lot more depressing.

@13: No kidding. These folks have always been around. The internet has just made them more visible.

Praise Jesus for these idiots. They may think they are crusading for truth, but they are really helping to undermine their religion within their own ranks. The crazies will believe anything. It's the well-meaning susceptibles who will be turned off by this and inoculated against further stupidity.

@13 and @14 I think this is just, as they say, another nail in the coffin that was progress. The new Dark Ages will begin slowly, I'd imagine. The States is firmly, decidedly, gleefully moving backwards where other countries are moving forward. Change is bad, the past is good, white, blond Christians with buzz cuts and pageboys are the best...and I say this as someone who still votes in every US election, and then watches the country I grew up in moving ever back toward embracing religious fanaticism, fear-mongering, and a deep-seated suspicion of getting one's appendix out for free.

Well, seeing as there is no center of the universe - at least as far as we can tell, the universe is homogeneous and isotropic - it's actually possible to construct an accurate geocentric model of the universe. An enormously complicated, frankly silly one - and one that ignores the fact that it's the sun that keeps the earth in its gravitational pull, not so much the other way around - but an accurate one nonetheless.

That being said, I'm pretty sure that's not what these numbnuts are getting at.

Slog crashed their website!

14 - yep, also the math is better in geocentrism. and the sun is not at the center of mass of the solar system.

19 - i meant 17

New Dark Ages?

I'd say we never left them. WWI and WWII were pretty fucking dark if you ask me.

This is just an odd assortment of weirdos.

Good, let's push them over the side and be rid of them all.

π = 3 It's in the Bible!

Where do I sign up to be a contestant on this Radiometric Dating Show, "Young Earth?"

actually, I think historians will identify the year the new dark age began as 1994.

Apparently God can't help them with their bandwidth.

Good Morning Dan,
I gotta ask "Is science always right?" What if it dispproved or proved something, anything for that matter that would come in great conflict with your political or moral value?

Check this out:

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/i…

Look, at first and only glance this conference seems silly and indulgent. These guys could be doing something else more constructive besides attempting to debunk Galileo (a fellow that even the late John Paul II acknowledged was a victim of Church persecution and expressed regret). This conference merely is an exercise in vanity.

By & large, I believe science to be "knowledge gained through observation and experimentation". I believe in global warming (I didn't need Al Gore, Earth Day or the Green Movement to tell me) but I most certainly don't take it hook, line and sinker. Let science scrutinize science.

FTR, I don't read the Bible, have any children that I know of and don't possess a car. I practice stewardship of the earth (since I was a teenager) and exercise critical thinking. I'd like to believe that helps the earth to be healthy and not "flat".

On the contrary, 2010 will be seen as the beginning of the Glorious Restoration of International Theocracy. Historians who suggest otherwise will be burned at the stake.

Freedom of speech is kinda like the mail. Every so often, you get something important, but mostly, it's just piles and piles of junk.

I think the inflection point will be seen as being in the late 70's/early 80's, actually. Look at all of our economic/social woes, and their recent origins/upswings seem to be clustered around the end of Carter/beginning of Reagan.

Can't we just put all of them on a rocket to the sun?

This guy's "online radio station" is hours of fun.

ND doesn't play a football game November 6, so what the hell else is there to do in South Bend that day?

@28:

Of course science isn't "always right", that's the entire point of the scientific method; to expose theories to the possibility of dis-provability. If a theory can be disproven through experimental means, then the theory is "wrong" in the sense that it does not accurately describe the phenomenon being observed, and thus the theory must either be modified or an entirely new theory must be developed that better explains the observed conditions.

It's another reason why restricting access to scientific research is so dangerous: without the open back-and-forth that occurs when scientists challenge each other, it becomes increasingly difficult to prove or disprove anything. And it's one of the reasons large fundamentalist (which includes the Church of Rome for most of its existence) religious movements have historically adopted a much more closed and restrictive policy towards access to information, because the fewer people who have access to knowledge, the lesser the chance any particular piece of dogma can be successfully disproven.

I'm almost afraid to point this out, but the Seattle Creation Conference is coming up October 1st and 2nd. John Byl, a young-earth creationist who has a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of British Columbia, and is overtly hostile to Galileo's helio-centric model of the solar system will be conducting a star gazing session on Friday night (weather permitting). The following day he'll be delivering a lecture with the rather incredible title "Cosmology and Reality".

The Stranger would be missing a, shall we say, stellar opportunity if they didn't send a reporter to this conference.

http://conference.nwcreation.net/

This reminds me of a guy in one of my college introduction to philosophy classes. One of the chapters was on Galileo, and also Descartes, and how they felt pressured by the church to keep their discoveries to themselves. One guy in the class objected to what he called an "unnecessarily hostile attitude toward the church". The professor pointed out that, in the case of Galileo especially, the church was using its authority to contradict provable facts.

The guy said that whatever the church said was true should be accepted as fact, whether provable or not.

I think he got an 'F', but, more importantly, it made me seriously wonder about my college's admission policies.

actually I figured 2001 to be the start of the dark ages.

Dan, these guys aren't saying the earth is flat, but that it's the centre of the universe.

Not that that makes it OK.

As anyone knows from high school physics, a Frame of Reference can be anywhere.

This means, that yes, you can calculate things from a geocentric frame of reference, and it would be just as valid as a heliocentric, or galactocentric frame of reference.

In fact, we do it all the time. When you measure the speed of your car (or LINK train) you don't add in the speed of the revolution of the Earth or spiral arm of the Milky Way.

@37, oh lordy, that reminds me of a guy in my Physics 101 class in college. We were studying light, and the prof, a former physicist for NASA, used astronomy for most of his examples.

A hand popped up in the front, and the student asked, in effect, "But, how does this explain the fact that the speed of light has slowed significantly since God created the earth? I mean, this just doesn't work on a 6,000 year scale."

The prof, remember, worked for GODDAMN NASA. I've never seen any instructor fly into a rage like that instructor did. I felt a bit of pity for the student when I found out that he had been homeschooled. Also, this school is in southwest Missouri, so he was probably surrounded by students with equally terrible ideas about science but with the sense to keep their mouths shut and their religion to themselves.

@10: But geocentrism isn't even in the bible. It's entirely based on interpretations of the bible, and heliocentrism (with regard to our solar system) jives just as well with Scripture as does geocentrism.
@19: Is Sol exactly at the solar system's center of mass? No. Is it very near to the solar system's center of mass? Hell yes.
Even if all 8 planets were to be aligned in syzygy to one side of Sol (and that never really happens), the center of mass would still be only about 8 E8 km outside the surface of the sun: less than three light-seconds. Quit splitting hairs.
Source: http://mechanicalintegrator.com/?p=148

I read this whole thing sure it was a joke and waiting for the punchline...

Guess the joke is that it's real...

@6: I'm from South Bend too, and it wasn't that bad. Like anywhere else there are some fringe loonies there, but most of the catholics I knew were level headed.

"Scientific Experiments Showing Earth Motionless in Space"

more like "Scientific Experiments Showing Little Or No Brain Activity in Fundie Religious Maniacs"

@41: a frame of reference is arbitrary, but not all frames of reference are born equal: inertial frames of reference are those where light travel on a straight line, Newton's law of inertia is valid, etc. In other words, explaining and predicting the world is a lot simpler if you do the math using an inertial frame.

Of course the sun is not an inertial frame either - it revolves around the center of the galaxy etc. But for everyday phenomena it can be taken as inertial whereas the earth cannot.

Finally, somehow I don't think this conference (if it's not a hoax) is about the relativity of frames of reference. It's more likely to be about the inerrancy of Scripture.

Applicable Kate Beaton webcomic:
http://starbucks.mirror.waffleimages.com…

Yes.

43, my dear, i'll split hairs whenever i fucking want. the post is quite superfluous IMO. the whole reason galileo was wrong in the eyes of the church is that he rejected the current epistemology of his time not because of his specific theory theory.

btw, thanks for googling stuff and giving me a link. the center of mass story invalidates kepler's first "law" (which galileo relied on i believe) for larger planetary bodies. that was my only point.

@51: Yeah, Kepler's First Law of Planetary Motion is not exactly correct, just the same way that the force of the Earth's gravity is not exactly constant across its entire surface.
Your hair-splitting is bullshit, dirac. In science, we work with what is close enough. Unless the solar system in question is a brown dwarf orbited by several gas giants (and how the hell would that come out of a protostar disk?), the system's center of mass will be approximately equal to the center of the sun, and the orbits of the planets will be approximately elliptical.
You don't throw away your meterstick because its measurements are off by a few microns, do you? Don't diss a perfectly good scientific tool just because it's incorrect to a minuscule degree.

I don't believe there are more of these nutters now than in previous decades; just that now, everybody is on much better footing when it comes to publishing their wackaloonery. Previously, everybody got their news through major outlets, period. Nutjobs that weren't singled out for amusement potential by the media powers-that-be were SOL unless they had a large enough following to fund, say, their own radio station. Now, everybody has more or less equal access to the conduits of information flow, and the only trick is drawing attention to yourself. The compensating feature is that it's easier to spot the freaks, point, and laugh. Think of the internet as an X-ray machine for "the woodwork."

re 53: that isn't to say that I'm not alarmed by the number of people who have risen to prominence by promoting this sort of ignorance (and proud of it, dammit!) as some sort of virtue. I can't tell whether Sarah Palin really is as stupid as she looks (though the Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson interviews were pretty definitive in my eyes) or whether she just hopes to take advantage of the same level of stupidity in her followers. Pretty much the entire cast of Fox news thrives on a combination of idiocy, demagoguery, and outright falsehood to whip their followers into a torch-wielding mob.

The one saving grace of the whole thing is that the Tea Party is more likely to cannibalize the Republicans than the Democrats. (The Repubs are even having to distance themselves from them.) To that extent, I say bring 'em on!

God needs to create a NEW flavor of 'cool-aid' so he can get these wackos real close real quick!

Holy fuck! Really?

It's a wonder that these people trust automobiles or, say, this Interweb thing they're using to advertise this stuff. After all, those things are all the result of that same evil scientific process that tells us that the Earth is in the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way Galaxy (decidedly not the Universal center) and that evolution by Natural Selection occurs and is indeed the most likely explanation of the origin of species.

@17: Is this still the "flat" n-dimensional torus model? My impression was that there isn't exactly a consensus that this is the best model. Also, in the page you link, the conclusion is that there is no way to tell whether there is a center located within the Universe (there IS a center in the Hubble model, located "outside" of the universe in n+1 dimensional "space", where n is then number of Universal dimensions, from which all points are receding equally fast; to use the balloon analogy, the center is in the middle of the balloon, in 3d space outside the 2d surface space that makes up the entire universe in this analogy; in an isomorphic model, this would be the intersection point in n+1 dimensional space of all normal vectors to all points in the universe). None of these possible "centers" is Terra: a geocentric Universe goes against everything we know. You're correct that one can construct a projection with e.g. Terra at (0,0,0,0 ... 0,0) in whatever-dimensional space one is using, but this model is not a best-fit or simplest model and is "wrong" in that sense if we're following the principle of Occam's Razor. Of course, in Hubble's model, there IS no center WITHIN the Universe, as you point out, so a geoCENTRIC construct is still wrong, as "center" has no meaning in this context.

@41 as well: A geocentric frame-of-reference would be just-as-wrong claiming a "center" to the Universe as any other frame-of-reference claiming a "center" if we're using a homogeneous isomorphic model, as there is no "center". But, as previously stated (@17, @47), I seriously doubt that they understand the distinction.

@52: Well, we work with "close enough" for any given application, since we acknowledge that any reigning theory or law is almost certainly not True in the absolute sense that scripture claims. Our models are best-fit models for whatever we're doing, with built-in and acknowledged error factors. The hair-splitting is important in certain contexts, not others. I won't make any sort of absolute claim as to whether it's relevant to this discussion; you obviously think it isn't, dirac thinks it is. You're both equally-wrong.

Jihadi murder-threateners make a talented Seattle artist, Molly Norris, vanish (with no comment from The Stranger) but hey, leave it to Dan Savage to fight 500 year-old battles with the Catholic Church. Sigh. So perfect. So Seattle.

Seattle gets a taste of real revolutionary confrontation, the central issue of our age and typically, ignores it. Molly's gone? Ahh, now we're safe. How jolly to be able to go back to messing up Eevil Republicans and evangelicals and clodhopping elected officials! You can tell the caliber of a man by the enemies he chooses.

@57: How's it feel to be a moron? That's the #2 most-commented post right now.

As a student in physics and astronomy, this makes me weep. :( How the hell did these people get their Ph. Ds? Fuck.... :/

More about Sungenis "credentials" here http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/s…

Please note that Sungenis has no official capacity in the Catholic Church and was forced by his bishop to take the name "Catholic" off of his organization. Thank you.

More about Sungenis "credentials" here http://sungenisandthejews.blogspot.com/s…

Please note that Sungenis has no official capacity in the Catholic Church and was forced by his bishop to take the name "Catholic" off of his organization. Thank you.