Copernicus was wrong -- bible says so -- "religious right" biblethumpers believe it -- this is not a joke

An emergent scandal over a Texas Republican Party politician's
distribution of a memo citing a "fixed Earth" website alleging the
Earth to be non-rotating and at the center of the universe has raised
the question; where do such eccentric views as Rep. Chisum's, that the
Copernican model of the Solar System is wrong and derives from a
Jewish Kabbalistic Conspiracy, come from ? Until recently, it's been
generally assumed that the debate over heliocentric vs. geocentric
models of the universe, that raged up until the advent of Copernicus,
had been well resolved. Lately though, an American movement has sought
to restore the Earth to a central position in the grand cosmological
scheme... Since the existence of the "Flat Earth Society" became a
widely traveled joke, it has become hard to determine if card-carrying
flat-earthers really exist any more; many join the society for
amusement. But, there are real geocentrists who dream of spheres
within spheres and orreries, speculate that Copernicus killed Tycho
Brahe and write dense, arcane mathematical proofs placing the Earth at
the center of it all. Variants of such views apparently can be found
in the Texas State legislature and, in 1999, Tom Willis --head of the
Mid-Atlantic Creation Research Association-- was " intrumental in
revising the Kansas elementary school curriculum to remove references
to evolution, earth history, and science methodology". Willis was also
a "geocentrist" and wrote, in 2000, a bold manifesto for both Young-
Earth Creationism and Geocentrism:



"...all experiments to demonstrate that the earth moves at all have
failed. All seem to indicate the earth does not move at all. There is
much evidence that the earth is young and cannot possibly be millions,
much less billions of years old but we will not treat that herein....
The Bible does not say that the earth is at the center of the
universe. But, anyone looking up can see that the sun, planets and
stars are moving. Galileo argued that this motion was relative, that
really the earth was spinning and it only looks like these other
objects move. But, both the observations and the Bible indicate quite
strongly that the earth does not move." - Tom Willis

Tom Willis wasn't the only geocentrist toiling away to reverse
scientific theories that had been accepted for centuries. Indeed,
geocentrists could be found in orbit, frolicking and also fighting
with Copernicans, around a key ideological and theological
gravitational center of the Christian right : the Chalcedon
Foundation.


http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/#48148