does anyone REALLY believe that the Earth is flat?

I've a friend who 100% believes the earth is flat, I asked her why the water doesn't just flow the edge and apparently there is a giant ice wall around the earth

Well we also have people who believe chocolate milk comes directly from brown cows, so...

I once went on a few dates with a girl who I rather liked, very pretty. I can't remember how it came up, but she told me one night out for something to eat, "I don't believe in dinosaurs".

I asked her what she meant, it's a strange thing to say. "I just don't believe in them, they weren't real, they didn't exist"... but.. but, there's fossils, hard evidence, they existed a long time ago! "No, I'm tired of people trying to convince me that they were real, they were made up for cartoons and films and childrens books".

The blooming romance fizzled out fairly rapidly that evening. Some things I cannot see past, I could never pretend that I was cool with that thought process!!

The Mighty Quinn wrote: »

I once went on a few dates with a girl who I rather liked, very pretty. I can't remember how it came up, but she told me one night out for something to eat, "I don't believe in dinosaurs".

I asked her what she meant, it's a strange thing to say. "I just don't believe in them, they weren't real, they didn't exist"... but.. but, there's fossils, hard evidence, they existed a long time ago! "No, I'm tired of people trying to convince me that they were real, they were made up for cartoons and films and childrens books".

The blooming romance fizzled out fairly rapidly that evening. Some things I cannot see past, I could never pretend that I was cool with that thought process!!

Funny, I would have found that cool and intriguing. You clearly weren't meant for her, and perhaps have a controlling impulse when it comes to women. Your road or the high road it would seem. Then again, my girlfriend also doesn't believe dinosaurs were real. Doesn't bother me one bit, we riff on all sorts of topics.

Most of these things are a useful exercise in skepticism in my opinion. Whereas many on boards will just see it as an excuse to point and laugh from the sidelines, group bonding at its finest, read into that what you will.

tjdaly wrote: »

Funny, I would have found that cool and intriguing. You clearly weren't meant for her, and perhaps have a controlling impulse when it comes to women. Your road or the high road it would seem. Then again, my girlfriend also doesn't believe dinosaurs were real. Doesn't bother me one bit, we riff on all sorts of topic.

Talk about conjecture.

StevieHardesty wrote: »

Nope - it's turtles all the way down. Maybe there are elephants on turtles but the turtle is yer man.

Well at least someone got the reference.

Dravokivich wrote: »

Do they get their maps from Civilization games?

She tried to make me watch a 90 minute youtube video as "proof"

To take the OP's question seriously for a second, the flat earth society is mostly a combination of people there for the lolz, contrarians who want to be different, a number of grifters looking to make bank off of the whole thing and a small number of true believers. If you watch a few flat earth videos and read the comments, you'll begin to notice a few common themes.

One is an inability to grasp scale. They simply can't get their heads around how massive the Earth and Solar Syatem is.
Two is their $h!tty "experiments" that mess up numbers, have no control and ignore any variables that don't suit them ("water on spinning tennis ball" and "water always finds it's level" bieng two examples). They also infamously covered up results that prove the opposite of a flat earth.
Three is that they usually lean super religious and try to cite the bible as evidence for a flat earth. Ive gotten into a couple of discussions with flat earthers online and it always comes back to Jesus with them...always.
Four is that there is a strong willingness to believe any and every conspiracy theory going. Chemtrails, 5G masts, fake moon landing...all of it. This allows them to all believe each others contradictory bull$h!t as they go further down the rabbit hole to unexplain the world. It currently stands as...

The earth is a flat disc with the North pole at it's centre. Around the outer edge is a game of thrones style ice wall that we know as Antarctica. Beyond that there may or may not be more continents full of mineral wealth. Antarctica is off limits due to the antarctic treaty and full of milliraty patrols who dissapear anyone who finds out the truth. All of this is covered is a Simpsons-movie-style giant dome called the firmament that keeps the atmosphere from escaping. It goes much, much deeper than that but you get the point.

COVID wrote: »

You probably think you're really clever saying that, but Bill Gates, 5G, Vaccines, etc. Whereas, Jim Corr, David Icke and the rest, one of them even smiled at the camera when he was on TV, which of course, is controlled by Jeff Bezos and George Soros. C.O.V.I.D.-19
Conspiracy
Of
Vicious
International
Demagogues

...haven't quite worked out what the '19' represents, but I'll have a bash after I have me tea.

CLOWN

NovemberWren wrote: »

dimensions are up, down, right, left, and time. and now there may be 10 more dimensions, at least.
and so, Jesus may actually have walked on water.

I'll tell you, I never got the big fuss about Jesus walking on water. I can walk on my lake three months of the year here, no problem.

We're lucky to be alive. That big wind yesterday could have blown the disc on to a vertical axis, and we would all have fallen off.

Of course it’s flat. How else could we build houses and skyscrapers?? The only part of earth that is not flat is in Pisa and look at how that turned out. Everyone thought pizza was round too, last time I ordered it came as a square.

Great documentary out about Flat Earth called 'Behind the Curve'. Learned a lot about the makeup of this movement.

For one thing, FE is not a unified church. You have your people who believe it's a flat disc. Others believe it's a curved disc. Others believe that the flat earth is but one region on an infinite plain. These factions do not particularly like one another and in some cases they believe that the other factions are exactly as bad as their believed conspiracy of the round earth.

What's hilarious is that some of these Flat Earthers are becoming so cocky that they're now conducting research to prove their hypothesis. One such experiment involved buying an outrageously expensive laser gyroscope (20,000 dollars) to disprove the idea of a spinning earth (Flat Earthers typically believe in a geocentric cosmological model). After finding that the gyro drifted 15 degrees per hour, they decided to hush up the result and tried to convince themselves that some sort of interference was happening.

Psychologically, it's also interesting. One guy who became the sort-of spokesman for the movement found himself going from a nobody to somebody. He had respect, and he also had the prospect of romance with a woman as deeply into the movement as he. You can see the sunk cost principle at work, here. Hard for him to walk from all his friends and standing. He basically admits as much in the documentary.