Mood:  incredulous

I have heard a great deal of stupid things in my life, but this new revelation by Sherri Shepherd, one of the co-hosts of The View on ABC is in the running for the most stupid of all time. She actually went on national television and said that 1) she doesn’t know if the earth is flat or not, and 2) that nothing pre-dates Christians. Joy and Whoopi were discussing an ancient Greek philosopher’s ideas and Sherri made some comment which Whoopi responded to by saying that the philosopher’s ideas and thoughts at that time were as they were because there wasn’t Christianity. Sherri retorted that nothing pre-dates Christians and oh yes, there were Christians back then because they were being thrown to the lions – that’s what she actually said!

WOW – what a brain dead hose beast! First off, it was not the Greeks that were ‘known’ for throwing the Christians to the lions, it was the Romans. Joy and Whoopi were talking about BC or BCE before our common era. Sherri didn’t know the difference between BC and AD (also known as CE). Talk about a dingbat. Outright persecution of ‘Christians’ didn’t really start (like authorized and encouraged by governments – ie throwing them to the lions) until the reign of Nero and late in his reign – like 64 AD; unless you want to count the Jews who saw them as heretics because these people started to take Jesus’ teachings before Judaism’s practices. Early Christians WERE Jews, not gentiles – duh, the Apostles! I mean, hello stupid Sherri, who do you think Jesus was trying to teach and was rejected by when he went to Nazareth? Hmmm? Hello – read the Gospels lately you stupid woman? Mark 3 or 6 or Matthew 13, how about Luke 4? Yes, you ignorant waste of space, the place where Jesus goes into a synagogue (a place of Jewish worship not a church) and tells the people he is the fulfillment of the prophecy at Isaiah 61: 1-2? Excuse me, you pathetic representation of intelligence– how could there have been a prophecy of His coming if there were no people before Christians? Hmmm, who was the prophecy given to? The Jews you nut job! Jesus was the JEWS Messiah!

I’ve actually heard some people say that she was technically right because Jesus and God are one – you know as part of the Trinity. They are WAY off track because she didn’t say Jesus, she said Christians. Also, this is what irks me… I’d like to know where the hell she thinks the first half of the Bible comes from or don’t Evangelicals read the first half of the Bible anymore or the later half for that matter? There were no Christians there were JEWS. Jesus was a JEW not a Christian. There weren’t Christians in Noah’s day; there weren’t Christians in Job’s day. If I could have reached into the TV set and slapped this stupid woman I would have. What about Egypt? Hmmm! The Jews were led out of Egypt, were they were being held as slaves, by Moses – remember ‘Let my people go’ and the plagues and all that stuff. They had been in bondage for a LONG time, since the time just after Joseph (of the coat) and his brothers. What is with these modern day Christians that don’t know their Biblical history spouting off with crap like this? The pyramids pre-date the Common Era by thousands of years. The First Dynasty was established in 3,150 BC. It’s one of the oldest and longest known ‘countries’ on earth – and that’s just it being known as Egypt. There has been human habitation that is proven to have been there since 10,000 BC. What about the ruins all around ancient Mesopotamia?  Alexander the Great was born 356 years before Christ.

First off, it makes all the people associated with this woman look stupid: 1) Barbara Walters should be ashamed of herself that she hired such a dumbass, 2) she is an embarrassment to women, 3) she is an embarrassment to America’s educational system, 4) she is an embarrassment to Christians, and if I were black – I’d probably feel she didn’t make such a hot impression for them either. Thank goodness for Whoopi Goldberg!

So there is my rant on her lack of her own religion’s history, now about the earth being flat.

Has she never seen a picture of the earth from outer space? Has she been living under a rock the last forty years? Has she ever heard of the expression ‘around the world’ or heard of anyone falling off the planet? How about global warming? Global – as in globe, as defined by Webster’s Dictionary: a body with the shape of a sphere, especially a representation of the earth in the form of a hollow ball; the earth; a planet. Did she not see a globe in school when she was a child?

 Now that we have access to space, the easiest way to prove the Earth is spherical is to leave it and view it from a distance. Astronauts and space probes have done just that. Every picture of Earth ever taken shows only a circular shape, and the only geometric solid which looks like a circle from any direction is a sphere.

One of the oldest proofs of the Earth's shape, however, can be seen from the ground and occurs during every lunar eclipse. The geometry of a lunar eclipse has been known since ancient Greece. When a full Moon occurs in the plane of Earth's orbit, the Moon slowly moves through Earth's shadow. Every time that shadow is seen, its edge is round. Once again, the only solid that always projects a round shadow is a sphere. 

To start with... there's a horizon, meaning that the surface that one is observing from is not an infinite plane. On the clearest of days, the only restriction to one's range of sight is the horizon. There can be two explanations for this - one, that the Earth at some point just stops, as if you were looking off the edge of a table. The other is that the Earth is round. Hundreds of years ago, before the invention of the compass or sextant, precise navigation for ships was difficult, even with the stars. Ships that ventured past sight of land were often lost, and thus it was generally believed that the world simply *stopped* at the end of the horizon. With the invention of the compass, and improved map-making, people began to dare more, and with the return of Columbus from his trans-Atlantic voyage, the concept of the Earth as flat was shattered.

Further proof of the Earth being round came after the voyage of Columbus when Newton discovered and measured the force of gravity, that number could then be tested anywhere the theory was known. Since the force of gravity is roughly the same everywhere on the globe, it could be surmised that the Earth must be spherical. If the Earth were not round, whole hemispheres would have different atmospheric pressure and significantly different sea levels. Also, pictures taken of the Earth in the last 50 years have proved absolutely conclusively that the Earth is round. These are just the arguments that don't require much physics knowledge to explain, there are others that are more technical, but I think that the simplest arguments are the best.

Okay – I am going to just chalk this up to her being a complete asshole. I will never watch The View – ever again. Barbara Walters has completed her voyage from journalist to dingbat know-noting when she hired this boob. Whoopi – get your intelligent self off this bunghole of a show!