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My Parents Are Flat Earthers

jameshfisher.com

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Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#101

Post by paradoxparalax »

black-tea wrote: post #88
intothemild wrote: post #63

I got to the part where his parents were jehovas witnesses, and realised that perhaps people who are gullible enough to believe dumb shit like flat earth, are probably wired to believe dumb shit. I’ll explain, my grandmother is a jehovas witness. She believes any dumb shit she reads and hears, no matter how easily one could refute it. She will argue black and blue, and if you try and tell her she’s wrong, it only rei…

My dad has been a lifelong atheist and a generally rational person but recently, thanks to YouTube, he's discovered conspiracies and gone all in on just about all of them. 9/11, moon landings, crop circles are all definitely conspiracies. I'm not sure what he thinks about flat earth yet but he'll probably get there. So it's not just pre-trained religious people who are susceptible. They're probably much more suscepti…

I make a daily effort to point out to elderly people in my family to be extremely aware of the electronic "fishing" for LandMoonDeniers, using "fishing hook/bait" headlines mixed in the middle of "serious/real" headlines, or adds placed by the website or the social media tool, and even spammed chat tool messages bought by the thousands from you know who.

When someone clicks one of this, they know you are easy to braiwash or scam. This is already very old technique , already used before Internet was so widespread, when a pretty girl will make cold calls all day long from some IP telephone call-center installed in Panama or Costa Rica or , in a small operation, in the Cayman Islands, and as she was trained, she could detect a LandMoonDenier in a minute by the phone, and she would set up the Larceny lace around his neck to scam her/his money.

Examples of this baits can be found, for instance, on The Sputinik News, what is very Scary and is a shame, and does't help at all the denial of Russian Interference by russian gov, but actually they don't really want to deny it(because it is not them who is doing this, If it was, they would never let the minimal vestige of evidence that it was them who do it), they know who is working in the shadows to elect , for example, a brainless in brazil, and they know this weird things are not coming from anyone from the U.S. or from the US intel, so they are just having fun playing and letting play, as long as the game is good for them.

:off course, the world's oldest profession is probably not that of the sex trade, or the sex trade was born at the same time that the criminal religious larceny firstly made by the first human who got a curious colored stone and told his tribe that this stone was God and that the village should give him/her good sex and good food,to keep the Priest of the Stone, bearer of the Words and Laws of God, happy, and to keep God happy by extension.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#102

Post by [deleted] »

mabbo wrote: post #33

I feel like the Flat Earth movement is, at it's core, a hack on the human mind. People want to feel important, and they want to feel in control. When the world is so large and uncaring, so horrible and meaningless, and people are so small and unimportant, a good conspiracy theory lets me be someone important . There are evil people out there who did this all to us, and now I get to know the truth . I get to be in bet…

[deleted]

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#103

Post by squirrelicus »

medion wrote: post #59
mabbo wrote: post #33

I feel like the Flat Earth movement is, at it's core, a hack on the human mind. People want to feel important, and they want to feel in control. When the world is so large and uncaring, so horrible and meaningless, and people are so small and unimportant, a good conspiracy theory lets me be someone important . There are evil people out there who did this all to us, and now I get to know the truth . I get to be in bet…

Would it be fair to say the exact same thing about, say, Christianity, or any large scale religion? That, at it's core, it's a hack on the human mind, for people to feel important, to feel in control, when the world is so large and uncaring? Because to me, this burgeoning conspiracy culture (chemtrails, 5G, flat earth, etc etc) just feels like people utilising the same brain space that was once more used for religion…

I think the same brain space is used by futurists too. Magic batteries, dehumidifiers, a/c units, rockets, tunnels, Mars colonization, integrated neutral/digital systems. People want to feel like they are a part of a new age of knowledge set apart from the intellectually content masses, and feel like they're more honest in breaking free from the doctrine handed down by elites.

And no. It's not fair to say that about religion in general. There are many reasons why people believe their religions.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#105

Post by sixstringtheory »

medion wrote: post #85
javajosh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe both you and the GP are correct. Moreover it generalizes even further and includes, for example, the identity politics dogma of the modern left. These beliefs about systematic injustice are more than just rational arguments, they are themselves an important component to an emotional identity, a key to understanding a complex, suffering world, and hence a way to see possible solutions to that suffering. (Als…

I struggle with Buddhism, only because while it is the only major religion that actually makes sense to me, I can't overcome the cultural disconnect as a white westerner, attempting to adopt ways of thinking which are so culturally different & abstract. Science at this juncture is the only method of looking at the world which appears rational to me, however unfortunately science doesn't have answers to the poetry of…

If you haven’t read it I’d highly recommend “The Universe in a Single Atom” by the Dalai Lama. He is one smart person, and I found it both delightful and thought provoking.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/100629

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#106

Post by M4v3R »

intothemild wrote: post #63

I got to the part where his parents were jehovas witnesses, and realised that perhaps people who are gullible enough to believe dumb shit like flat earth, are probably wired to believe dumb shit. I’ll explain, my grandmother is a jehovas witness. She believes any dumb shit she reads and hears, no matter how easily one could refute it. She will argue black and blue, and if you try and tell her she’s wrong, it only rei…

> Thing is about Jehovas witnesses is they believe that there’s a limited number of places in heaven, and only the truly devout will get a spot

> No mattter how many times I’ve told her that she won’t earn one of the ~200,000 spaces in heaven (it’s really what they believe)

It's not. They do believe that a limited group of people - 144,000 to be exact - will live in heaven to be kings and rulers, but the rest of faithful JWs will live on a paradise earth, without any disease and death - forever. So they don't "compete" for the spots in heaven, if fact they believe those are people already chosen by God and feel that they have heavenly calling somehow. It is true that they feel they have to sort of "earn" their spot on the paradise earth by having deep faith and doing good deeds, among of which are contributing to the church financially, preaching the "good news" and converting people.

Source: I was a JW for 14 years and quit few years ago.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#107

Post by zubairq »

If people want to believe in flat earth, let them. And flat earthers should allow others to believe in what they want to as well. In 1000 years people will look back at all of us and think of how primitive we were for believing many of the things that we believe too. And another 1000 years after that then people will do the same. I think that looking down on people for believing something different is the same as racial hatred (it all comes down to prejudice)

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#108

Post by scarejunba »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #96
lisper wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'Being in a club with secret knowledge' doesn't fit the description of 'religion' very well, Why not? (I debated whether or not to include "religion" in my comment because the word is so laden with baggage, but ultimately decided that it was apt, so I am prepared to defend it if you really want to go down that rabbit hole.) > But 'flat earth' has to be the dumbest of all. Not even close. (Go read some Scientology l…

+ ~90% of the world's population are religious (depending on how you look at it) and they mostly grow up in communities wherein everyone is basically the same religion, ergo, they are not generally 'missionary' , 'proselytizing', nor do they feel they have access to 'special information'. In fact, it's the total opposite: for most of the world's religious, 'religion' is just part of every day, normative culture in mo…

It’s all just layers of shit for people who are incapable of knowledge acquisition. Maybe one thing is piles of chicken shit mixed with pig shit and the other thing is one pile of horse shit but it’s all just shit. Flat Earth crap, anti-vaxxers, chemtrails, Scientology, Mormonism. They like to draw distinctions between them but it’s all just a matter of the kind of shit.

Waste of time trying to say which one is stupider than the other because they’re all stupid. Not a worthwhile distinction irrespective of what percentage of world population believes whatever.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#109

Post by squirrelicus »

medion wrote: post #85
javajosh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe both you and the GP are correct. Moreover it generalizes even further and includes, for example, the identity politics dogma of the modern left. These beliefs about systematic injustice are more than just rational arguments, they are themselves an important component to an emotional identity, a key to understanding a complex, suffering world, and hence a way to see possible solutions to that suffering. (Als…

I struggle with Buddhism, only because while it is the only major religion that actually makes sense to me, I can't overcome the cultural disconnect as a white westerner, attempting to adopt ways of thinking which are so culturally different & abstract. Science at this juncture is the only method of looking at the world which appears rational to me, however unfortunately science doesn't have answers to the poetry of…

Religions are a combination of unbelievable fairy tales and rational teachings with thousands of years of deep thought about and iteration on how to make a better world. Secular ethical thought is still in its infancy and highly disjointed; and it's not clear that it's even possible to achieve what many religions have without the unbelievable fairy tales.

Remember, as much as Buddhism might teach you to be... well, Christlike frankly, you still have to accept that the afterlife, karmic cycle, and Nirvana are intrinsic fairy tales unseverable from the religious teachings themselves.

Maybe the fairy tales aren't bad. Even if they aren't true.

Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers

#110

Post by scarejunba »

svat wrote: post #87

I love this article: https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-... (“Why mythbusting fails: A guide to influencing education with science”) Narrowly, it's about “learning styles”, the idea that certain students are e.g. “visual learners” and would benefit from education geared towards visual learners. But more broadly, it's about science in general, about persuasion. In its second half (starting at…

I thought this “visual learner” vs other kind thing failed to replicate. Example of article listing some sources: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth...
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