Is Flat-Earthism any Wackier than Other Flavors of Religious Woo?

[Torin]

Given the current culture, there's likely to be a major difference between the psychology of a typical Catholic and the psychology of a typical flat earther. A Catholic, typically, is simply intellectually passive - he or she was probably taught to believe in Catholicism and just never questioned it. A typical flat earther, by contrast, would have to deliberately choose to believe nonsense in a world where practically everyone emphatically disagrees with him, including the highest scientific authorities.

You're right that there's a difference, I just don't think it's an important difference. It's a bit of an argument from popularity or convenience.

I think that if you asked 99% of catholics if they believe that a person rose from the dead after being entombed for three days, then performed scientifically impossible feats like walking through walls and levitating into the sky, they would go with their religion and not the science. They would tell you that food becomes their jesus in the flesh and blood. You would find that they deliberately choose to believe nonsense. That they haven't been confronted generally about their beliefs or went out of their way to find them really isn't important. Those religious beliefs are just as unscientific and impossible.

Important for what? It's important for judging the intellectual honesty of a Catholic as opposed to a flat earther (or should be, if you're fair). The Catholic is typically passive, whereas the flat earther is typically in conscious rebellion against science.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Personally, I have a hard time believing there is a flat earth movement and always viewed it like an Andy Kaufman faux movement.

...Might have agreed, until the first time I tried to explain a technical problem in the system to an officer. People who don't even know enough to understand how little they know will still insist they know enough to argue with an expert.
And once invested in that side of the argument, they will do ANYTHING to prop it up so it looks like an alternative.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Personally, I have a hard time believing there is a flat earth movement and always viewed it like an Andy Kaufman faux movement.

...Might have agreed, until the first time I tried to explain a technical problem in the system to an officer. People who don't even know enough to understand how little they know will still insist they know enough to argue with an expert.
And once invested in that side of the argument, they will do ANYTHING to prop it up so it looks like an alternative.

The speed limit on stupid is infinity, but Flat Earth... that is infinity factorial. I can accept that there are a few people on the planet that don't accept a spherical Earth, I can not believe there are enough to consider a movement, or even a small Google Group.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Right. I'm more annoyed by the people who think that polkas are music.

 

[Shadowy Man]

It’s one thing to crow about life after death, fate, or the creation of the universe but it’s another to stand on a beach yelling that the ocean doesn’t exist.

 

[Tammuz]

It’s one thing to crow about life after death, fate, or the creation of the universe but it’s another to stand on a beach yelling that the ocean doesn’t exist.

Yeah. And also, religion is often transmitted through culture and society, and religiousity can be vague. Neither is the case with the flat Earth movement.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Given the current culture, there's likely to be a major difference between the psychology of a typical Catholic and the psychology of a typical flat earther. A Catholic, typically, is simply intellectually passive - he or she was probably taught to believe in Catholicism and just never questioned it. A typical flat earther, by contrast, would have to deliberately choose to believe nonsense in a world where practically everyone emphatically disagrees with him, including the highest scientific authorities.

You're right that there's a difference, I just don't think it's an important difference. It's a bit of an argument from popularity or convenience.

I think that if you asked 99% of catholics if they believe that a person rose from the dead after being entombed for three days, then performed scientifically impossible feats like walking through walls and levitating into the sky, they would go with their religion and not the science. They would tell you that food becomes their jesus in the flesh and blood. You would find that they deliberately choose to believe nonsense. That they haven't been confronted generally about their beliefs or went out of their way to find them really isn't important. Those religious beliefs are just as unscientific and impossible.

Important for what? It's important for judging the intellectual honesty of a Catholic as opposed to a flat earther (or should be, if you're fair). The Catholic is typically passive, whereas the flat earther is typically in conscious rebellion against science.

I don't understand how being "passive" has anything to do with intellectual honesty.

 

[Shadowy Man]

I don't understand how being "passive" has anything to do with intellectual honesty.

Perhaps the point is that he believes that it is less intellectually dishonest to be simply ignorant rather than willfully ignorant. The levels of Dunning-Kruger confidence about physics and astronomy on the part of flat earthers is truly staggering.

 

[Torin]

I don't understand how being "passive" has anything to do with intellectual honesty.

Not having thought about an issue is less intellectually dishonest than deliberately accepting and defending the wrong answer.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I don't understand how being "passive" has anything to do with intellectual honesty.

Not having thought about an issue is less intellectually dishonest than deliberately accepting and defending the wrong answer.

I've talked to lots of catholics and have never met one that didn't honestly believe their teachings. I know lots of catholics who have thought about their beliefs, accept them and defend them, ludicrous and unscientific as those claims are.

So I suppose you must be claiming that flat-earth beliefs is just more ludicrous than a bible full of ludicrous stories and a catholic catechism equally filled with ludicrous claims and teachings. I don't know why you would think that but it reminds me of catholics who talk about Mormon beliefs being ludicrous. It's obvious when they do this they don't appreciate pot/kettle.

So I suppose we'll have to disagree on this one.

I have friends who are hardcore bigfoot believers. One is convinced there is a family of bigfoot living on his farm. I don't know how I'd identify his level of intellectual dishonesty/honesty. He's not an overly bright person certainly, but his bigfoot convictions are as real as any religious silliness.

 

[Shadowy Man]

So I suppose you must be claiming that flat-earth beliefs is just more ludicrous than a bible full of ludicrous stories and a catholic catechism equally filled with ludicrous claims and teachings.

Yes, it is.

I can’t disprove Catholicism with grade school geometry.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

So I suppose you must be claiming that flat-earth beliefs is just more ludicrous than a bible full of ludicrous stories and a catholic catechism equally filled with ludicrous claims and teachings.

Yes, it is.

I can’t disprove Catholicism with grade school geometry.

My take is that absurd, though traditional, religious claims have been around for so long that we're just used to them. Along comes a new and equally absurd religious claim but it's novelty makes it more absurd and garish and intellectually shocking.

 

[Shadowy Man]

So I suppose you must be claiming that flat-earth beliefs is just more ludicrous than a bible full of ludicrous stories and a catholic catechism equally filled with ludicrous claims and teachings.

Yes, it is.

I can’t disprove Catholicism with grade school geometry.

My take is that absurd, though traditional, religious claims have been around for so long that we're just used to them. Along comes a new and equally absurd religious claim but it's novelty makes it more absurd and garish and intellectually shocking.

I disagree. I think it is harder to disprove most religious claims than Flat Earthism. Knowing the Earth isn’t flat is older than Christianity and the reasons we know are so obvious that school children can point to a sunset to prove it.

 

[steve_bank]

I went to Catholic schools. The RCC has always been a mix of rational science and theism. In the 90s the position on evolution became that it is part of god's plan. Other denominations have followed to a degree.

Pseudo science is science that can be proven wrong. The Christian creation myth is neither provable or disprovable.

From a certain perspective the BB Theory could be considered woo, it is entirely speculative. There is no way to demonstrate it. We accept it generally because it is based on science we can demonstrate and see today.

I would not label Christianity pseudo science. I call it mysticism and the supernatural. That encompasses a lot.

Religion usually involves a higher power or sprit. Pseudo science does not.

 

[Keith&Co.]

In perspective....

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I went to Catholic schools. The RCC has always been a mix of rational science and theism. In the 90s the position on evolution became that it is part of god's plan. Other denominations have followed to a degree.

Pseudo science is science that can be proven wrong. The Christian creation myth is neither provable or disprovable.

From a certain perspective the BB Theory could be considered woo, it is entirely speculative. There is no way to demonstrate it. We accept it generally because it is based on science we can demonstrate and see today.

I would not label Christianity pseudo science. I call it mysticism and the supernatural. That encompasses a lot.

Religion usually involves a higher power or sprit. Pseudo science does not.

That's the conditioned bias I'm talking about. People coming back to life, walking through walls, flying around in the sky, doing impossible things generally is as dopey and pseudo as dopey gets. But we give it a pass because it's "religious" and therefore sacred. It's pseudo bullshit woo of the first order. The supernatural is superpseudo.

 

[ronburgundy]

Both F.E. and religion are forms of preference-based belief. Holding the belief serves some sort of emotional appeal or utility function to the person, regardless of whether the belief is accurate. The believer prefers the outcome that results from believing that the claim is true and that preference is the basis of believing that it is true, prior to and without consideration of relevant evidence, even including evidence from personal experience. Because there is no process of information gathering or reasoning, the belief is formed instantly and effortlessly as soon as it's emotional appeal reaches some threshold where the utility of believing it becomes higher than actually understanding reality in that domain. And once the belief is held, it then becomes the causal determinant of how one responds to all relevant experience, knowledge, and information that is relevant to the claim. If information is compatible with the pre-determined preferred conclusion which is the exact opposite of a rational scientific approach in which the process of considering relevant information determines the belief/conclusion.

So, one could call these anti-rational beliefs because they represent the reversal of the rational thinking process, but that ignores the preferences that are the whole motivation behind these reversal of rationality.

Likewise, calling F.E. and all forms of preference-based belief "religion" ignores important differences in what gives rise to those motivations, and what social structures exist to enable the irrationality and thus select which types of people are likely to buy into which forms of preference-based beliefs. It's true that all preference based beliefs share some core features of deliberately ignoring/perverting evidence and science to protect preferred ideas, and that similarly applies to religion and F.E., as well as other anti-science beliefs like climate change denial, anti-vaxx, racial supremacy, denial that lack of restrictions on gun access is a huge causal factor in US homicide rates, and many beliefs across the political spectrum that pervert the science for some political/ideological utility. But clearly these are not all "religion" in any meaningful sense, and they differ in important ways.

That said, religion and non-religious preference-based beliefs can share core motives. For example, some people are partly motivated to believe in Abrahamic monotheism b/c it provides an authoritarian order to the world and puts people into clear classes of moral worth. That is a similar motivation behind racial supremacy, or the irrational denial that random chance is the greatest determinant of disparate economic outcomes under capitalism (which is a way of protecting the belief that outcomes are "just" and the result of worth and merit, much like within religion).

 

[ronburgundy]

I went to Catholic schools. The RCC has always been a mix of rational science and theism. In the 90s the position on evolution became that it is part of god's plan. Other denominations have followed to a degree.

And for the century prior to the 1990's, the RCC irrationally attacked the science of evolution, using all the same tactics as F.E., anti-vaxxers, and other crazy woo nonsense. The fact that they decided to change their strategy to stem the rapid loss of adherents (and revenue) doesn't make them any less peddlers of woo nonsense or enemies of reason. Also, there change wasn't to really accept the science of evolution. The idea that God guided evolution is simply a form of artificial goal-directed genetic manipulation and selection, where God is analogous to Monsanto. As such, it is logically incompatible the scientific theory of natural evolution where speciation occurs via processes of random variation and happenstance selection depending upon what happens to work well in that context at that time. Theistic evolution also promotes the anti-science notion of evolution as progressive and linear. The type of theistically controlled evolution that the RCC promotes only accepts the most vague broad brush notions that organisms have changed over time, but it promotes the rampant distortions and misconceptions about how evolution actually works and how it historically unfolded.

Pseudo science is science that can be proven wrong. The Christian creation myth is neither provable or disprovable.

Creationism is logically at odds with science (as is theistic-evolution). If creationism is viewed as nothing but fictional allegory, then of course it is neutral to science b/c it then it isn't making any claims that are relevant for objective reality. But the RCC, only treats some of the creation story as myth and some as fact, and that makes it incompatible with science and reason.

In addition, the creation story, and any claim that presumes the existence of an immaterial mind is against the absolute mountain of science strongly showing that everything we concieve of as "mind" is a byproduct of particular, rare organizations of matter. IOW, science strongly refutes the theory of God that the RCC and almost every monotheist believes in.
Reason is not neutral on God. God is among the most unreasonable and implausible notions ever conceived. Thus, anyone or organization that promotes the idea that God exist is engaging in anti-reason and anti-science, even moreso than the craziest woo pseudo-science believer you can imagine.

From a certain perspective the BB Theory could be considered woo, it is entirely speculative. There is no way to demonstrate it. We accept it generally because it is based on science we can demonstrate and see today.

Accepting theories because they are logically supported by the science we can demonstrate today is called science, not woo. Being able to directly observe a theorized event unfold is not a requirement for something to be science. Reasoning about what the observable evidence logically implies about what was most likely to have happened in at a particular point in time is called evidence-based reasoning, not "speculation".

I would not label Christianity pseudo science. I call it mysticism and the supernatural. That encompasses a lot.

The RCC and most theists do engage in forms of pseudo-science to try and make their beliefs seem less anti-science and irrational than they inherently are. However, the religions are not in themselves psuedo-science b/c in principle one could just completely ignore science and not even try to appear rational, as Martin Luther the founder of Protestantism advocated. But any theistic religion (or one that promotes an afterlife) is inherently anti-science in that they deny the relevant science that supports ideas which are logically incompatible with their preferred beliefs.

Religion usually involves a higher power or sprit. Pseudo science does not.

The notions of a spirit or higher power are more irrational, anti-science, and implausible than the vast majority of non-religious pseudo-science claims. Also, psuedo-science as a method of dishonest rhetoric to hide the irrational faith-based nature of one's beliefs is often engaged by many religious leaders and followers. So, that makes some pseudo-science an aspect of most religions.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

In perspective....

View attachment 23334

Umm...

Firstly, is Eratosthenes an Egyptian name (no)? Secondly, he was born a couple centuries plus prior to the world going to AD standard years. People around 6,000 years ago could be forgiven thinking the world was flat.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Umm...

Firstly, is Eratosthenes an Egyptian name (no)?

Does that prevent him from being a citizen of Egypt?
Ellis Island practically made an industry of trampling people's original names by Anglicizing them. If he'd come to New York, he'd have been Error Steen. At least our ancestors had the grace to just tack on suffixes.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene, or Eratosthenes of Alexandria.

Or maybe that wasn't their name, maybe they just published their addresses the way some people @ their email with every. Single. Memo.