I always thought the Flat Earth movement was laughable. What shocked me is how far spread the movement has gone. I even asked my son who is in seventh grade if he knew of the flat earth movement. He knew all about it! He even told me that there was this pretty girl in his class that believes the earth is flat. He went on to tell me that she was not very bright and gets terrible grades. lol
Here is the link to the survey to see for yourself:
https://today.yougov.com/topics/philosophy/articles-reports/2018/04/02/most-flat-earthers-consider-themselves-religious
After giving this survey some careful though, I can understand why the numbers are as high as they are. Here is how. Consider that the survey polled Americans. Many Americans are Creationist (believing that their existence is directly due to divine creation instead of evolution). America has very strong religious population and even has a name for a concentration of highly religious people called the “bible belt”. Flat earth movement and creationist have a common reality and belief. The though of a universe that brought about stars and planets and life itself goes against the concept of some creationist. The poll even found that 52% of the people polled that believed the earth was flat also considered themselves “very religious”. Also, flat earth conferences in the US have far more turn out than other places in the world which would coincide with the religious demographics of creationist.
It appears that journalist that have interviewed Flat Earthers and attended Flat Earth conferences have found that there is a high concentration of religious people. Another statistic that was discovered in the survey was the younger the individual, the more likely they would believe that the earth is Flat. This also makes sense given 71% of Americans who embrace new religions do so between 18-24 years old. I also noticed a subtle occurrence of the people interviewed openly disclose a traumatic event in their life. While there is no clear evidence that traumatic events lead to Flat Earth belief, it seems reasonable that people with a traumatic event could seek out comfort of a community. Not everyone must be religious or a creationist to be a flat earther, but there is a very strong community that brings them together.
It is interesting to notice Flat Earth is gaining momentum against a belief system that was taught. This is a huge obstacle to overcome. How is this being done? The answer is simply through community. It has leveraged Social Media interactions and physical social meetings of people to grow their movement.
Should you worry about the Flat Earth movement? There is a huge number of people that go to great lengths to challenge the belief of the Flat Earthers and to ridicule them. There are plenty of videos and content out there to provide you an almost unlimited entertainment. Some of those people are extremely aggressive with no need. Here is my view on if we should worry about Flat Earth movement. Anyone that takes a college physics class will not be able to pass as physics will contradict flat earth beliefs. So there really is nothing to worry as there just won’t be higher educated (flat earthers) that build the things we need and want.
We can learn that humans have a need for community. We as humans are looking for Happiness & Fulfillment. There is strong fulfillment in faith of something that we are passionate about (in our case STEEM blockchain). Perhaps the failure in our major institutions is to answer very simple questions about human desire. There is definitely desire to have community and social acceptance. Just look to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others. They have embraced the social community. We are better and have advantages over those networks. Now go out and nurture our very own social community and fulfill that human desire for acceptance.
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ― Albert Einstein
