Flat Earth's Religious Underpinnings

I’ve spoken about this a few times over the last several years, but it bears a rementioning because if we cannot figure out, in 2019, how to convince people that the world is globular then what hope do we have for any kind of progress. Perhaps the future will look back at this period and think, “good thing we got that sorted out;” but as it stands now it’s very hard for me to think that we can move forward.

Flat Earth is another one of those cases wherein my conspiracy theory work and my atheism cross paths. It’s more interesting to me than just that, because flat earth has an added feature of disguising itself from it’s religious foundation.

Good conspiracy theorists know how to do this, as most of them would probably be good sales people if they had turned their focus somewhere else. Alex Jones was one of the pioneers at selling things on internet broadcasts, for instance. David Icke takes care to never mention the reptoids in his marathon speeches. Why? Because people like him know that the money is in the products they are selling, and Icke’s brand in particular needs to get over the very large incredulity of the average person to his centralized point that the world’s governments are under control of reptilian shape shifters from the fourth dimension (not time, but the other fourth dimension). Buy his book and you’ll find out about it. Alex Jones, just talks about “globalists” without ever getting specific, watch his movies and that’s a different story (though he’s still very cagey about naming who they are).

Flat Earth is one of those similar things. They begin asking questions about weird errant datum: “how come it looks flat?” “Did you know that Nazis worked on the space program?” Now, both of these questions have answers: Earth is too big to see the curve from standing on it, and yes they did, what’s your point? But these questions are the first step to the rope, and let’s be perfectly clear: they’ll ask as many questions as it takes to get an inkling of doubt out of an individual. It’s eerily similar to how religious evangelists who knock on your door operate: just get the person to question something and then they’ll hammer on that until they accept the Jesus (because it’s never a different religion).

I don’t have the psychological research to argue this from an evidence standpoint: but my hypothesis is that it’s tied into two distinct features of the human psyche. The first is the sunken cost problem. This is our unwillingness to let something go when we’ve spent some time/money on it. If you are engaged in a conversation with someone you’ve spent time, and are less willing to let that time go, especially if you’ve found the conversation interesting. Flat Earth is interesting because the people have spent some considerable time and effort into attempting to prove something that doesn’t exist. Just that feature alone is amazing. It’s like listening to my five year old try and tell me that her unicorn makes horse noises: she’s got a couple of different reasons that she’s clearly thought about. The average person would be unwilling to just dismiss the entire conversation because some of the questions do make you think. This leads directly into the second feature: our unwillingness to suspend judgment simply because we don’t know a thing. Did you know that the flat earth conspiracy is the reason that travel is banned to Antarctica?

No. It’s not but the average person has no idea about the laws governing Antarctica so that question might make them pause. Rather than admit that they don’t know a thing, especially about an uninhabited (relatively anyway) continent that has a strange legal system around it. So an individual might concede the point, unless they reach into their pocket and pull the world’s knowledge out of it to look it up.

That’s how we get roped in. The simple answer to the question of life after death: the central question I see on religious billboards and amongst the people that used to come to my door, has a simple answer as well–I don’t know and neither do you.

Flat Earth takes it one step further. Not only do they hide their central claim behind a series of questions (that all have answers), but the great many of them also hide the religious fundamentalism behind it. I’ve listened to several podcasts about the subject, read their posts, visited their websites, and at the bottom of it all is a religious extremism. The Bible, taken literally, describes a flat earth. This is a hyper-literal reading of the book and it permeates the flat earth.

Even Ken Ham, thinks that flat earth is stupid. Ken-fucking-Ham, the guy that built a boat in the center of Kentucky thinks it’s the dumbest thing. Yet, the FE’ers have a point: it’s in the bible, so who are they to pick and choose what parts of god’s holy book they are going to follow. Hendrie’s “Greatest Lie on Earth,” Sargent’s YouTube video series, Oh No Ross and Carrie’s eight episode investigation into the Flat Earth–all reveal this religious foundation.

There are numerous problems with the flat earth theory, that much should be obvious, however the religious issue seems to be a necessary feature rather than a weird anomaly. What’s ironic about the whole thing, is that a little questioning would break apart the flat earth explanation as much as it breaks apart the religious foundation. It’s too bad that the second irony is that they don’t like answering questions themselves.