Talk:Earth
[edit] Magellan quote is a fabrication of Robert Green Ingersoll
As pointed out elsewhere, the Magellan quote was really authored by Robert Green Ingersoll. The words are found in the fourth paragraph of Ingersoll's essay entitled "Individuality" which was published in 1873. Here is the precise wording, "It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions, -- some one who had the grandeur to say his say. I believe it was Magellan who said, 'The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.' On the prow of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn, and success."
The improbability of Magellan saying those words will be seen as obvious when one realizes the Catholic Church never insisted on the flatness of the earth. What the Church pronounced as dogma was the notion the earth was the center of the Universe. The sphericity of earth was long known for thousands of years even before Christ. In the 15th century Michael of Rhodes wrote a treatise on this.
There are surely over fifty sites on the Net where this quote is shown and attributed to Magellan. Correcting this error is a herculean task but not impossible. There are site owners who're aware of the mistaken attribution but haven't quite resolved the issue of what to do. One need not be a genius to know the moral obligation of correcting the error. I have called the attention of over a dozen site owners, and most have seen the necessity of attributing to Ingersoll squarely the authorship. Vicente Calibo de Jesus
