Posted on 12/09/2009 12:06:32 PM PST by steve-b
"As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities."
--Voltaire
"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true."
--Demosthenes
A long, long, long time ago, many people believed the Earth was flat, but for more than the last 2,000 years few educated people have subscribed to this delusion. The story (included in some textbooks used in American schools) that Christopher Columbus' 1492 voyage was the first proof that the Earth is round and not flat is deceitful historical revisionism, nothing more. For (literally) thousands of years, people who have paid attention to the world as it is have known that the world is round. It never was or will be flat, a point to keep in mind.
Still, even today there are those who believe in a flat Earth and, more to the point of this column, equally absurd fantasies. Until 2001, when he died at the age of 76, Charles Johnson was president of the International Flat Earth Research Society near Lancaster, Calif. He believed that the space orbits of Earth never happened (after all, how can a flat plane be orbited?), the photographs from space showing the circular Earth were fakes and that the televised moon landings actually took place in a Hollywood studio according to a script written by the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Flat-Earthers set the standard for fabulists, but they are certainly not alone in their ability and, more importantly, desire to believe the unbelievable and, in some but thankfully not all cases, to act aggressively, destructively, violently, even murderously toward unbelievers.
The Earth is not flat, but flat-Earthers have clearly evolved into many other fields, an amusing concept when one considers the flat-Earth thinking of those creationists who do not believe evolution exists. Creation science, like flat Earth, is an oxymoron. The Earth is round, not flat, and science is concerned with the investigation of empirical evidence, not with trying to squeeze reality into the tiny, narrow, inflexible, dark confines of a supernatural belief system predicated on faith, not knowledge. And there is always an agenda, sometimes obvious and often much less so, behind the absurdities of fabulist thinking. If you can make a person believe the Earth is flat, what can you not make him believe or do? For one thing, you can make him fear, disbelieve, distrust and view as the enemy anyone and everyone who sees the Earth as round. And that's power.
There is always power and control in the hands of the authorities of belief systems, whether religious or political, economic or even philosophical. This is as true of small, relatively harmless fringe group true believers like Charles Johnson's as it is of any number of more mainstream or at least better known and even generally accepted ones. Everyone will have their own preferred list of the evolutionary descendants of the flat-Earthers, and one man's flat-Earther is another man's avatar. And, of course, everyone has been a flat-Earther at some time in life, but some people learn, grow and evolve beyond Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, virgin birth, the bogeyman and a flat Earth. Others prefer the easier route of what Demosthenes termed "self-deceit."
In addition to the already mentioned creation science, here are a few recent examples of the evolution of flat-Earth belief systems in modern times, some more dangerous than others:
--Global warming deniers: Led by head political cheerleader Sen. James Mountain Inhofe of Oklahoma, who regularly quotes the Bible to justify his political decisions, deniers are like creationists in that they confuse and/or conflate science with their beliefs, in this case economic beliefs.--The Obama birthers: This conservative movement continues to maintain that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president of the United States because he wasn't born in the United States, despite the fact and the documentation that he was. The Earth has always been round and Obama was always born in Hawaii.
--Obama-as-Muslim believers: This group is almost indistinguishable from the birthers and like them and the flat-Earthers ignores the evidence. The Earth has never been flat and Obama has never been a Muslim. (A pertinent aside: It is neither dishonorable nor dangerous to America to be a Muslim.) If it weren't for the dangerous ugliness of the racism and fear of Islam that fuels these two groups, their deceits would be a joke. But, though their flat-Earth thinking is laughable, they are not.
>>The earth isn’t flat, therefore Anthropogenic Global Warming deniers are wrong?
The earth isn’t flat, therefore Obama isn’t a Muslim?
The earth isn’t flat, therefore Obama was born in Hawaii?
This article marks a new low: especially considering it’s from a writer who all-too-obviously thinks he’s got that logic stuff cold.<<
Yep, that is pretty much the support for his arguments. And you did it in just a few sentences. Way to go!
This sort of stuff only fares well when presented to True Believers. “The other guys are flat earthers!”
:)
You mean like the atrocities committed by the French revolutionaries, ardent disciples of Voltaire and Rousseau? Not to mention their spiritual descendants the Nazis and commies?
What a bunch of &*&%$##@@!!!!
The Real Copenhagen Agenda: The U.N.’s climate chief tells all.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567921682049840.html
Phil Jones, director of the research program at the center of “climategate,” temporarily stepped down from his post Tuesday. And last week, Pennsylvania State University said it would launch an inquiry into the conduct of Michael Mann, one of its professors and perhaps the world’s most prominent paleoclimatologist.
Messrs. Jones and Mann have both been key contributors to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The emails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit two weeks ago revealed, among many inconvenient truths, the corruption of the IPCC’s process of assessing climate science. Still, despite the probes into some of the IPCC’s key participants, the chair of that body insists nothing rotten is about to happen in the state of Denmark, where world leaders are set to debate sweeping policies based on IPCC conclusions.
“It is a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which insures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening,” Rajendra Pachauri told the Guardian on Sunday, adding that “people who are aware of how the IPCC functions and are appreciative of the credibility that the IPCC has attained will probably not be swayed by an incident of this kind.”
But the heightened awareness of the IPCC’s functioning seems precisely what now plagues the U.N.’s global warming frontman. So it’s not surprising that, for all his insistence that the group’s methods are spotless, he seems eager to change the subject from science. What he has chosen to talk about instead is instructive.
It seems what most concerns Mr. Pachauri now is not climatology, or glaciology, or oceanography—but the way we live. “Today we have reached the point where consumption and people’s desire to consume has grown out of proportion,”
Read more at online.wsj.com ...
“And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. “ - anthropomorphic global warming pimp,Stephen Schneider.(Quoted in Discover, pp. 45–48, Oct. 1989)
“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience” -Albert Camus
“Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.” -Benjamin Franklin
LOL = just look at the author of the article. It makes you wonder what’s a Dick Dorworth
Until it got to his list of other flats earthers, I honestly couldn’t tell if he was going to side with the AGW crowd or lambaste them.
Everything he said prior to the list could describe belief in AGW just as well...
Er, wasn’t the Flat Earth Society just a fun club and a way for the owner to make a little money on the side?
In 1977 the exact same arguments would have been made for all the “Idiots” who didn’t buy into the idea that we’d soon have a new ice age due to man-made global cooling.
BTW it's rude to post than absolutely ignore the people that make legitimate comments to your posting.
“...what’s a Dick Dorworth”
Less than a bucket of warm spit.
Well, that's certainly my view of it, but shush, don't tell the libs. They're too much fun to play with.
Dick Dorworth needs an education on the definition of science.
The man is completely clueless.
History will not be kind to these people.
Busy time of year — Happy Holidays, y’all....
I posted this on his web page artcle:
Dick Dorworth can call me a “Flat-Earther” all he wants and it won’t change one fact about the Global Warming debate will it? Dorworth is not trying to convince you the science is sound, he is trying to convince you that those opposed to the swindle are either evil, stupid, or weird. So much for common decency from the “tolerant” left!
The argument is not whether the planet is getting warmer or colder, what matters is whether or not we can do anything about it. That is the real argument, and an argument the AGW proponents, like Dorworth, refuse to participate in. And since AGW proponents won’t debate the carbon “crisis”, their justification for taxing and controlling industries around the world, we are left to use their own claims concerning man’s activities, as well as facts that are readily accessible, to determine the legitimacy of their case for regulating Carbon, while they call us names.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) tells us that humans contribute 5% of atmospheric carbon concentrations, and Carbon Dioxide from man’s activities needs to be reduced to save the planet. For the sake of argument let’s accept their number of 5%. Since we also know that the carbon dioxide currently makes-up thirty-eight one-hundredths of one percent (.0038) of our atmosphere, it is easy to do the math to determine the outcome should we do what they tell us needs to be done. In fact, lets go farther by pretending that every man, woman, child and SUV has died and use the full 5% instead of the far smaller reduction they now expect to achieve with us all stubbornly staying alive.
By multiplying 38/100 of one percent by 5% (.0038 x .05) you get the number of .00019, or 19/1000 of 1%. Now think about that. If every person disappeared off the face of the Earth we would achieve a reduction of a colorless, odorless, harmless inert gas called Carbon Dioxide by .00019 the total of all atmospheric gases. Think about it, all this nonsense about changing our atmosphere by less than nineteen one-thousandths-of-one-percent. It’s astoundingly stupid.
Think about what they are asking us to sacrifice to change the atmosphere by far less than the number we just calculated. Consider how many jobs they are asking us to give-up for that number. Think about the freedom they are asking you to sacrifice to accomplish nothing.
How compassionate is it to advance a lie that insures the third-world will experience many more generations of hunger and poverty. It is not only absurd, it shows you just how craven and dishonest the global left has become in their quest to lord over the rest of us rubes and peasants.
Simple math demonstrates what an outrage this fraudulent Anthropogenic Global Warming campaign is. Too bad Mr. Dorworth spends his time attempting to demean people rather than learning simple math.
Charles McFarling
Indianapolis, IN
Merry Christmas to you.
The flat earth hoax that people believed the earth was flat was invented in the 1800’s to discredit the church. If you go back and actually read the history books you will find that people knew the earth was round. The reason that they came up with the notion that people believed the earth was flat was to say the the church hid the truth from the people. The issue wasn’t so much whether the earth was round but the size of the earth.
A mischaracterization (similar to the way that AGW skeptics are said to believe that climate change doesn't exist).
In general, creationists tend to accept microevolution (adaptation) while challenging macroevolution (emergence of new species).
bump
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