Seriously Christians? Really?!

Joshua 'stopping the sun'.

There are actually adults who believe the sun can stand still and performs strange manoeuvres in the sky!

Not just that but they believe these could be visible only in a small village or town, and non-one else on Earth would see them!

Seriously! There are actual grown ups who believe the following:

Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the Lord fought for Israel. And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, unto the camp to Gilgal. But these five kings fled, and hid themselves in a cave at Makkedah.

Joshua 10:12-17

They probably went an hid themselves in a cave to avoid the idiot who wrote that because whoever it was, believe the sun goes round Earth!

Ah! But that was all a long time ago, wasn't it? People know better now, don't they?

Not a bit of it! In a book published in 1974 and which is still available today, Baltimore industrialist and self-proclaimed Bible scholar, Harold Hill, reprinted a story he had originally published in 1969 in Evening World, a magazine from Spencer, Indiana:

The space scientists were checking the position of the sun, moon, and planets out in space, calculating where they would be 100 and 1,000 years from now. In addition, they were looking into the trajectories of known asteroids and meteors so we wouldn't send astronauts and satellites up only to have them bump into something. Satellite orbits have to be laid out in terms of where the heavenly bodies will be so that the whole thing won't become a head-on traffic collision.

Well, as they ran the computer measurement back and forth over the centuries, it came to a halt. The computer stopped and put up a red flag, which meant that there was something wrong either with the information fed into the computer or with the results as compared to the standards. They called in the service department to check it out.

"Nothing's wrong with the computer," the technicians said. "It's operating perfectly. What makes you think something's wrong?"

"Well, the computer shows there's a day missing somewhere in elapsed time," the operators said. They rechecked their data and scratched their Educated Idiot Boxes. There was no answer, no logical explanation. They were at a baffled standstill.

Then one religious fellow on the team said, "You know, one time when I was in Sunday school, they talked about the day the sun stood still." He about got laughed out of the room, because nobody believed him, but they didn't have anything else to try, so they invited him to show them what he was talking about. He got a Bible and turned to the Book of Joshua where Joshua was called to battle against all the Kings of the Amorites, kind of a formidable array of enemies. In the account, they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anyone who has an ounce of common sense. They found the Lord saying to Joshua, "Fear them not, for I have delivered them into thine hand. There shall not a man of them stand before thee." The Bible went on to say that the Lord slew Joshua's enemies with a great slaughter, and they began to flee before Israel. And the Lord cast down great stones from heaven, and more of the enemy died from the hailstones than were slain by Joshua's troops. But there were some of the enemy left, and Joshua prayed for the sun and moon to stand still until the Israelites had finished avenging themselves upon their enemies.

"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

"There," the Christian space man said. "There's your missing day. Go ahead and check it out."

Well, they checked the computers, went all the way back to the time when Joshua defeated the kings, and found the explanation was close, but not close enough. The elapsed time in Joshua's day was only 23 hours and 20 minutes, not a whole day. There was still a discrepancy of 40 minutes to be accounted for.

Consulting the Bible record again, they found that it did not say that the sun had stood still for a whole day, but for "about (approximately) a whole day."

So they were still in trouble. Forty minutes become extremely significant when they are multiplied many times over in orbits. Then the religious fellow remembered somewhere else in the Bible where it said the sun went backward. Naturally, the other space men told him he was out of his mind, but once again, they had no real choice in the matter, so they went back to the Bible and read in 2 Kings, the 20th chapter, how Hezekiah on his deathbed was visited by the prophet Isaiah, who told him that he was not going to die, but that God would heal him so he would be well enough to go to the temple in three days. Furthermore, God promised to give him 15 more years of life on earth. That was such good news that Hezekiah couldn't believe it! He asked for a sign as proof that God's word was true.

"Do you want the sun to go ahead ten degrees?" Isaiah asked him.

"No," Hezekiah said. "It's too easy for the sun to, go ahead ten degrees. It does that all the time. It goes ahead every day. But how about letting the shadow return backward ten degrees? That'll be a new thing, and then I can believe."

And so Isaiah spoke to the Lord, and the Lord brought the shadow ten degrees backward. Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes!

Twenty-three hours and 20 minutes accounted for in Joshua's day, plus 40 minutes accounted for in Hezekiah's day--there was the whole 24 hours, the missing day that the space scientists had to make allowance for in the logbook.

Harold Hill, How To Live Like a King's Kid, pp 66-69.

And this is the entirely fictional origin of the claim you'll still see today that NASA 'Found Joshua's missing day'. There really are people who believe it! People buy Hill's book and cite it as evidence!

In Portugal, in 1917, people believed they saw the sun performing all sorts of gyrations:

Page from Ilustração Portuguesa, 29 October 1917, showing the people looking at the Sun during the 'miracle of the Sun', Fátima.

Source: Wikipedia - Our Lady of Fátima

What they believe they saw depends a great deal on who reported it. Some people described the Sun as spinning round like a wheel, others saw it changing colour while yet others reported seeing it dance and zig-zag across the sky and some saw the Sun advancing towards Earth, radiating heat as it did so. Some even reported seeing white flower petals falling to Earth to disappear as they hit the ground. Still others reported seeing nothing unusual.

Remember, everyone else on the daylight side of Earth saw nothing unusual too!

The fact is, for the sun to appear to do anything visible from one point on Earth, it would also be visible doing it from about half the globe. But that's not the real killer, obviously. The fact is that for the sun to appear to do anything strange by way of its apparent transition across the sky, Earth would need to be the celestial body moving erratically. Earth would need to stop spinning and even reverse if Isaiah's trick of reversing time actually worked. Earth would need to jump about or spin round or advance toward the sun.

At the Equator, Earth is spinning at 1037 mph, If it stopped spinning abruptly everything on the surface at the Equator would continue in a straight line at 1037 mph according to Newton's Laws of motion. This exceeds the escape velocity for Earth's gravity. Everything would fly off into space. No buildings could possibly remain upright, Continents and mountain ranges would be torn loose and Earth would probably shatter. The molten core would continue spinning like tea in a freshly stirred cup. Ttectonic activity would probably turn Earth molten.

And that's not all.

Earth is orbiting the sun at 18.5 miles per second (66600 mph). Any sudden change in that speed or direction would utterly devastate the planet, again throwing anything not fixed down into space. Imagine the momentum of the Eurasian continent, complete with the Himalayan Mountains and the Central Asian Plateau, travelling at 66600 mph! Imagine the oceans trying to continue in a straight line at 66600 mph!

It simply and unequivocally did not happen!

There are many places in which the Bible, by it's scientific illiteracy, falsified the notion that it could have been written or dictated by an omniscient creator god but the story of Joshua's lost day must rate as one of the best. It is utterly absurd and calls into question the entire reliability of the Bible as even a historical record. It was made up by people who did not know what they are talking about.

There is no reason their history would be any more accurate than their science.

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