Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire You Can't Make Up This Kind of Stupid

What??? The earth isn't flat? Gee, you learn new things every day!

the arc of the sun shows the shape of the sun for anybody with a half an active brain cell.

There is that. Bit lower actually.

Ah! See, the dedicated Flat Earther will tell you that it is an optical illusion brought on by the effects of altitude, the curvature of the window or the camera lens, blah, blah. . .

However, once you've gone down this bunny hole, nothing makes sense anymore. The other thing you have to understand is the purveyors of this crap don't believe it either. However, if you buy into it, you are checking your logical thinking at the threshold.

I have a 10" Dobsonian telescope that I sometimes bring out for some stargazing. Years ago, a telcom salesman lived down the street, and he used to come up and watch me do stuff. That, in and of itself, was weird. He'd never pick up a hammer or anything, but he enjoyed watching me do home improvement.

Anyway, Steve saw me out in my driveway one night and he came up to see what I was doing. He and his wife had just joined a new church that was deeply into anti-Evolution, anti-this and anti-that. It was a clear moonless night in the winter and I was trying to see what I could see. He stood and watched me for a while, and I described things to him like the Andromeda Galaxy and such. I offered to have him take a look. He stiffened.

"No," he said. "I'm sure if I looked in there, it would be nice, but I'd see things that would make my life more complicated. I don't need complicated. I like simple answers."

Ah! But to a Flat Earther, Isaiah and Job were talking about a circle (2D) instead of a sphere(3D). We could be living on a dinner plate instead of a billiard ball.

I wonder how they explain all the other planets, stars and moons keeping the flat side of their disk to earth at all times?

Do they say how an eclipse works with a flat surface?

Flat earthers claim that the sun and moon are spheres. Lunar eclipses are the result of an anti-moon. They've got it all figured out. It's all in the link that I posted above. I'm going to join. If you join, please put me down for the referral.

You have to remember that this is mostly a matter of "Don't confuse things with the facts, my mind is made up." I gave up a long time ago trying to joust at the "Fake Moon Landing" and "911 was an Inside Job" windmills.

I shouldn't really say that. It's not accurate. Even the most wrong-headed ideas are based on what folks believe are facts. Furthermore, once someone links this to their Faith, it's impossible to extricate it.

BTW: For those of you who feel Flat Earth Theory makes your head spin, then Hollow Earth Theory will make it explode. Jules Verne did not pull the idea out of his sphincter. It came from a popular theory. Edmund Halley (of comet fame) was a big proponent. The major US proponent, John Cleves Symmes Jr., was born and bred just down river from me in Cleves, Ohio. There is a monument to his work in downtown Hamilton, Ohio. At one point, the US government was going to mount an expedition to the North Pole "hole." However, Andrew Jackson killed the project when he took office.

I bumped across Symmes when I was researching his father in preparation for a novel. Symmes' father was a piece of work as well. He's most famous for the Symmes Purchase, a huge tract of land in SW Ohio that includes the entirety of the Cincinnati/Dayton metroplex. He worked off a botched survey that forgot to take into account the difference between True North and Magnetic North. He then made matters worse by selling tracts outside the original purchase. There were actions in the courts throughout the 19th century to settle exactly who owned what in this part of the world.