Flat Earth Facebook Memes: Scraping the Absolute Bottom of the Intellectual Barrel

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I apologize in advance if any of these cause your brain to liquefy and begin bubbling out your nose in a desperate effort to escape. If you've read this prior article of mine, you'll have some idea of what sort of belief system could compel adult human beings living in a first world country to make stuff like this.

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Stuff like this comes from a place of deep, deep assumption. A great many people, having been raised from birth to believe that the Bible is unquestionably true, have naturally concluded that because every field of science contradicts the cosmology and account of human origins found in Genesis...all of science must be satanic conspiracy to turn people away from Christ.

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This means trusting Biblical claims over anything a non-Christian scientist has discovered which contradicts them. Unavoidably, this puts even NASA in conflict with scripture, in the places where scripture describes the structure of the Earth and the cosmos.

A recurring theme you might notice is that these people mistake holes in their own understanding of basic physics for errors in science. Rather than think "this does not make sense to me, but I bet there is a scientific explanation I don't yet know about" they instead think "This does not make sense to me. Because I have complete knowledge of everything, that means scientists have either made a mistake here or are liars".

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When I say basic physics, I mean stuff like the fact that local gravity pulls inward towards the center of the Earth, not "down" according to the orientation globes are typically displayed in. They do not understand that there is no objective up and down in space.

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When all scientific findings about the Earth and the cosmos contradict your religion, but you're 100% committed to your religion, what choice is left but to conclude that all of science is just one big conspiracy against your religion in particular?

As if it's so good, pure, true and important that the entire discipline of science, the world over, was invented purely to attack it. That's a grade A victim complex right there. The alternative possibility, that their religion is false, doesn't seem to even occur to them. It's simply off the table.

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You can see the same backwards thinking in the pic above. Rather than concluding that scripture describes stars this way because the authors were ignorant of the size of stars, they instead conclude that if science says stars are that big, science must be wrong because it contradicts the Bible.

This is such a heavily slanted mindset, that someone who thinks this way could never even possibly be convinced their beliefs are untrue, no matter what evidence you showed them.

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A flat Earth covered by a solid dome would be unambiguously artificial. It could not come about naturally, as spherical planets that form by gravitational accretion of debris can, so it would point strongly to the existence of a creator.

The alternative they never consider is that the authors of the Bible speculated that Earth was shaped that way because they believed in a creator. The same reason why the Norse religion, Egyptian religion and so on also included flat Earth cosmologies.

From their perspective, the motive for NASA to hide evidence of a flat Earth is to prevent people from concluding that the Earth was created by Yahweh, the god of the Bible. Again, their reasoning is somewhat more comprehensible if you put yourself in their shoes and assume very strongly as your premise that the Bible is completely true.

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The meme above repeats a common strategy I have seen before from evangelicals, which is to accuse any organization they want to discredit of being secret worshipers of demons or competing religions.

You see this in Jack Chick comics which purport that Muslims actually worship a Moon goddess, which is in fact a disguised demon. Ask any Muslim if that's what they believe and they will laugh at you before possibly exploding.

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There's a lot of disagreement even within this special ed circus of a movement over the exact details. Some believe the Earth is not a disc but an infinitely extending flat plane. Some believe that beyond the ice wall are other flat worlds that could be reached.

Amusingly, proponents of a hollow Earth, an equally stupid idea, believe flat Earthism is a false flag intended to make hollow Earthism look stupid. Which is weird, since I've heart flat Earthers say the same thing about the hollow Earth people:

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Once you stop applying critical thought and requiring empirical support for claims, you have taken the first step away from truth and into madness. No matter how sound your reasoning is after that point, it progresses from a faulty premise and as such can only lead you further and further astray, until you're posting on Facebook about lizard men and greys from Zeta Reticuli living inside the hollow Earth, or NASA faking the moon landing to prevent the public from finding out the Earth is flat.

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I wish these were fake. But I've spoken to these people. They are for real. Unless every one of them is doing a lifelong Andy Kauffman style act, these people really do believe what they say they do.

Assuming they can't really be that insane or stupid only enables them to continue spreading their beliefs unopposed, which (for example) is how creationism has made such headway as of late.

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I wish there wasn't so much of it either, but there is. Take a gander at this gallery of posts from one of several flat Earth Facebook groups. Even that is still just a tiny slice.

This is a problem that cannot be solved by ignoring it. Live and let live, "back off and let people believe what they want" apparently results in absolute insanity swallowing up and destroying scientific truth.

It's tempting to imagine it will sort itself out somehow, because the alternative is tedious, grueling argument. The sort where you must remain polite and restrain yourself from laughing at or insulting these people, otherwise they only dig in their heels further.

This is insidious too, because it satisfies a popular desire to feel as if they're onto some grand conspiracy. That they are not deceived, but clear headed free thinkers...but crucially, in a way which assumes the Bible is true. It's like the retarded alternative to actual free thinking for people who want to feel enlightened without having to learn anything.

What's to be done except engage these people? Reason with them? Even if the best we can do is to unfuck their brains one at a time, if enough of us do it, we might be able to turn the tides. What does the outcome look like if we don't?

P.S. Just so Muslims don't feel left out:

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