So I have a born again christian family member in their mid twenties who stated with complete confidence that there is a dome in the sky called the firmament and beyond it is where heaven is. She believes space doesn’t exist and rockets just blow up because the bible said so. She is not the brightest and normally I would let this sort of nonsense go but I work in aerospace and have multiple pieces of hardware in space so she is either calling me ignorant or a malicious agent for the devil purposely lying for her so I got pretty annoyed. I can’t find anything about this dome in a google search about religion and I suspect she ended up on a flat-earth YouTube channel that twisted a line in the bible to fit their beliefs and didn’t actually get it from her church. I know its probably hopeless to help her understand how dumb and frankly insulting this belief is but I can possibly talk some reason if I understand the source.

Are there any major or minor religions, christian or other that believe space is a lie and only god is outside our atmosphere?

  • @Earthwormjim91
    33•7 months ago

    The idea of a firmament is definitely a thing and has been for thousands of years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament

    I’ve heard about it all my life from mainstream Christian churches too. Though it’s more of a metaphorical thing than physical. Like it’s a supernatural reason why we can never get to Mars rather than being a glass dome.

    • @[email protected]
      9•7 months ago

      I always had the impression that firmament was synonymous with atmosphere for some reason. I’m not sure where I got that idea.

      • FuglyDuckEnglish
        17•7 months ago

        there’s been a lot of ways of rectifying what’s obviously true and scriptures over the years.

        which is amusing because they’ll do anything to not admit their scripture-writers were wrong. It was written by people with a fixed- and flawed- understanding of the world they lived in. (We too have a fixed and flawed understanding, in point of fact. Its a bit better than theirs, mind, but it’s still flawed.)

        “yeah. they believed that. they were wrong” isn’t really all that damaging to the over all story. But they think it is.

          • FuglyDuckEnglish
            2•7 months ago

            Some religions update their interpretations. The Catholic Church, for example, has taken different points of view over the centuries on various things as they were proven to be false.

            most denominations and sects do, yes. There are still those more fringe-cases that absolutely do not.

            If I remember correctly, the Catholic Church doesn’t even rule out alien life at the moment. I remember reading a while ago that they were skeptical, but if aliens are proven to exist, they hope to find an alien species that did not betray God like humanity did in the garden of Eden.

            It’s not a betrayal, because they were innocents and had no knowledge. in that story, god created the scenario and then allowed it to happen… and then gaslit the shit out of humanity ever since.

        • @positiveWHAT
          1•7 months ago

          WDYM we also have a fixed understanding? I’m as fluid as science.

          • Square Singer
            5•7 months ago

            History is full of great and not so great scientists who just couldn’t accept a paradigm shift that totally changed their field of science.

            Germ theory for example was a big one that got rejected by most of the medical scientists and professionals for decades.

          • FuglyDuckEnglish
            3•7 months ago

            I mean our conception is fixed to what we currently know. (Or “know”) in the broad scheme of things it would be rather rare to come across something that changes your fundamental understanding, right.

            Looking back we can see that a lot of what people thought was straight up stupid. like barnacle geese… coming from… barnacles

            But an observer looking back from far in the future at us… will likely see some of our beliefs as ridiculous.

    • OtterEnglish
      4•7 months ago

      I guess the realistic equivalent might be our local group. We can reach galaxies within it, but everything outside is moving away too fast for us to reach?