Mark Twain, a staunch non-believer who routinely mocked Christians and maligned the God of the Bible, once wrote, “One of the ‘proofs’ of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They have also believed the world was flat.”

My guess is Twain was referring, at least in part, to Greek philosophy which led people to believe stuff like the earth sat on the back of the god Atlas, who stood upon giant tortoises, who stood upon elephants, in a sea of cosmic nothingness.

As we know, when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 the leading scientists of his day argued the earth was flat.

Columbus, however, a zealous Christian, explained in a personal journal he kept that he was certain he wouldn’t fall off the end of the earth by what the Bible revealed.

Specifically, he quoted in his journal three Old Testament verses: Job 26:7 (“He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.”); Isaiah 40:22 (“It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.”) and Ecclesiastes 1: 6 (“The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.”)

Of his sailing venture, Columbus wrote, “It was the Lord who put [it] into my mind. I could feel his hand upon me the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit because he comforted me with rays of marvelous inspiration from the Holy Scriptures."

In his journal entry for the journey to the Indies, Columbus wrote, "I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps. It was simply the fulfillment of what Isaiah had prophesied."

When my mom was in school, American history textbooks actually quoted Columbus from his journal, but nowadays they don’t even tell you the basics of his mission with any reliability.

From the website of Accuracy in Academia, for example, is this excerpt on Columbus’ explorations from the widely used college textbook, The National Experience, written by some of the history profession’s most prominent men, including John Blum and Edmund Morgan, both history professors at Yale; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., City University of New York, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the late C. Vann Woodward, a Pulitzer Prize winner who taught at Yale:

"Christopher Columbus, son of a Genovese weaver, was a man with a mission. He wanted to reach the Orient by sailing west, and he was convinced that the distance was no more than about 4,000 miles. Columbus was wrong, and when he wanted to sell his idea, the experts told him so. The experts had known for centuries that the world was round, and they had a much better notion of its size than Columbus did. The king of Portugal would have none of his scheme and neither would anybody else until Queen Isabella of Spain, who was not an expert, decided to take a chance. Armed with this commission, and with a letter to the Emperor of China, Columbus made his magnificent mistake. He failed to deliver the letter, but he found America."

As Mark Twain also once wrote, “The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”