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?
So what’s your method? I don’t think you ever actually spelled it out in the comment unless you meant sending them to therapy, which isn’t a bad idea.
Forget all the evidence and facts. Provide psychological support instead.
They’ll just consider psychological help as brainwash attempt and reject the help.
There’s no help for them. It’s sad really.
Just be kind. Be a human. Ask them how their day went. Listen to their worries. You don’t have to be a psychologist or pull any complex therapy maneuvers. Leave that to the professionals. Just having a normal every day chitchat can be surprisingly helpful to someone who is living in a completely different version of reality.
Just talk about other every day things, and avoid the topic of delusion.