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?
I’m curious if anyone else is able to provide an example here. Personally, I grew up in an extremely right-wing, very isolated, very culty version of the southern baptist church. I was around young-earthers, anti-vaxxers, anti-evolution folks, dinosaur/man co-existence, believing black people are black because they’re cursed—all sorts of crazy whackadoodle shit. I never once met someone who didn’t believe in space. I think you’re right that this was a YouTube Fact™ that she picked up somewhere.
It’s a thing, but even the creationists debunk it.
The summary is that, ancient people did conceive of the sky to be solid, but the Bible itself never says so in unequivocal language.
One could interpret the word used for “firmament” as being synonymous with the atmosphere and interstellar space and the texts still make sense.
https://creation.com/is-the-raqiya-firmament-a-solid-dome
The understanding of the world also changed during the immense time of writing
Yeah, I came from the same background. Dinosaurs bones are a test put there by the devil to make believers doubt the young earth shit, the asteroid belt was originally the planet that Lucifer dwelt on, and God destroyed it when he cast him out, and that’s why it’s there, all kinds of shit. Never had someone tell me space wasn’t real, though. I’m sure a lot of them had a geocentric model stuck in their brains, or maybe didn’t believe in existence outside of the solar system, but the shepherds needed the star to guide them to Bethlehem, so they at least believed in space.