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?
To be clear I couldn’t get a hit on a religion believing it is a solid impassable dome in the sky. I got hits on flat earther crap that sadly I knew about because another family member was a full fledged flat earther… (These are all in-laws BTW). I also found the bible definition which only states that the firmament is a barrier between heaven and earth. I am mostly just trying to figure out where she got this nonsense from and I suspect it was going down a rabbit hole on YouTube that led to a flat earth video using the bible as evidence of the flat earth. She has a short attention span so she probably stopped paying attention after the part where they said the sky is a dome because she said the earth is round.
The important part about Flat Earther beliefs that always seems to get left out is that they’re a fundamentalist christian sect.
They don’t believe the Earth is flat because of “the evidence”, or even necessarily that the Earth is flat that’s just the corner of their belief structure that got famous. They believe that the biblical Truth from God is the enemy of Science and that “they” are trying to keep that from people, in order to lead people away from God. Then comes the “evidence” and “debates” which are them trying to meet non-believers halfway, but fundamentally not understanding how/why science is a way of processing information.
Fortunately/unfortunately most Flat Earther’s got made fun enough publicly enough that they’re not really preaching it anymore. They’ve since moved on to other apocalyptic religious movements like Qanon/MAGA.
Is she on TikTok? There’s a lot of conspiracy theorists growing followings on there under the guise of religion, health, nutrition, etc.