The modern dark age. According to the Marxist-Communist Obama, whom nobody should equate with leadership or intelligence, any person who denies that a trace chemical named Co2, which is 4/100 of 1 % of atmospheric gas by weight, 5% of which is emitted by man, drives weather, climate change or warming, must perforce also believe in a 'flat earth'. The allegation is as banal and stupid as it is historically invalid. No one in Europe after 300 AD believed in a flat earth. The writings of Christian scientists and philosophers from Boethius to Bede make this clear. Christians discovered not only the rotation of the earth in the 13th century, but began to forward the idea of a heliocentric universe.
It is sad but not unexpected that an American president is so illiterate. The great swathe of popular culture is similarly immune to reason and veracity. The flat earth nonsense, a pejorative aimed at Catholic Middle Age Europe, was first uttered by the very untalented Washington Irving who had the audacity of mendacity to portray Christopher Columbus as a simple mariner confronting a screaming inquisition, a befuddled queen, and a court of Christian knuckle-draggers who were clinging to their swords, bibles and flat earth theorems. In 1828 Washington Irving published his book, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus and geniuses since that date have believed that his science-fiction was history.
The perception that most of Europe believed that the Earth was flat in 1492 is beyond stupid. Almost everyone in the Middle Ages knew that the Earth was spherical in shape. At the same time as 'truth teller' Irving was flinging his refuse, an atheist Frenchman, Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), a profound anti-theist, published a similar claim. A short time later Auguste Comte (1798-1857) also made the same claim in his writings. Comte is famous as a progenitor of positivism – a part of the cult of Atheism - and the idea that 'progress' occurred step by painful step, out of the darkness of 'superstition' and into the 'light' of materialist 'science'.
In 1896 Andrew Dickson White, the founder of Cornell University, wrote his “History of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom.' White picked up on the flat-earth lie to aid in his denigration of Christianity – much in vogue in the 1890s – as an artifact that must be tossed aside to allow 'real science' to flourish. Perhaps White had the 'real science' of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia in mind, 2 communal fascisms ran by atheist-evolutionists.
White's nefarious ignorance found its way into every textbook. The educational system ran riot with the fable that Christians were recently flat-earth worshippers.
Back in the real world the facts highlighted the opposite. Long before Columbus everyone in the Church believed that the earth was a globe. Dante’s Divine Comedy portrays the Earth as a sphere. And it was written between 1306-1321 AD. Clement, Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Isodore,Venerable Bede, Albertus Magnus and Aquinas all acknowledged the earth as spherical.
Jeffrey Burton Russell exposed this myth in his book, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1991). He explains:
“If Christians had for centuries insisted that the earth was flat against clear and available evidence,” explains Russell, “they must be not only enemies of scientific truth, but contemptible and pitiful enemies.”
Anyone who actually believes the lie that Christians were flat-earthers is as ignorant as they are feeble of mind. The real flat-earthers are those who posit that the Church is opposed to science, or that the Enlightenment 'freed' Europe from superstition. The French Revolution, Darwinism, Marxism, Hitlerism, Communism and Atheism make that claim a contemptuous statement of dogma, cant and illiteracy.