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Let's say I don't believe the world is round. How can one prove the world is round to me?

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Timothy Todd, Geologist, writer (transitionstofreedom.com), traveler
Answered May 12, 2017




There are some great answers here, and another one is probably not necessary. But I had an exchange with some flat earthers that shifted my perspective on their thought processes (or the lack of them).
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Anyone that’s ever interacted with an actual FE adherent knows that they will reject all evidence that the earth is any shape other than flat. Depending on your disposition, it can be pretty entertaining to watch them struggle through the dissonance that arises when they attempt to reconcile their unshakable faith in their world view with facts that contradict it.
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I used to live in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. We had a house there that faced west with a spectacular view of the coastline and the Pacific. It was about 1200 feet above sea level.
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One evening, near sunset, I was at home perusing the silly musings of a group of FE adherents on a public forum. My wife happened to be in town near the beach about the time the sun set. I called her just as it was setting to ask her to tell me the exact moment that the tip of the sun sank below the horizon. At the moment that she confirmed her observation of the sun’s disappearance, I could still see a portion of the sun above the horizon from my elevated vantage point. I then marked the time that I observed the sun disappear below the horizon.
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The distance to the horizon on the ocean (presuming the earth is spheroidal) can be estimated by using d = 3.57 * √h where d is the distance to the horizon in kilometers and h is the elevation of the observer in meters. Using 5 meters for my wife’s elevation (she was not directly on the beach) and 400 meters for mine, I estimated that the distance to the visible horizon for her was about 8 kilometers, while from my location it was about 70 kilometers. Since she was about 5 kilometers west of me, I added that to her 8 kilometers, making my visible horizon about 57 kilometers further west than my wife’s.
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The earth’s rotational speed at any latitude can be estimated by multiplying the cosine of latitude in degrees by 1670 kilometers per hour (the rotational speed at the equator). In our case, we were at about 19.6 degrees north latitude, so our rotational speed was around 1,570 kilometers per hour, or about 26 kilometers per minute. That meant that the sun should disappear under the horizon about 2 minutes later for me than for her, which is exactly what we observed.
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I shared our observations and the associated calculations with the FE cultists on the forum that I’d been reading. You won’t be surprised to learn that I was unable to claim a single convert. Instead, I was ridiculed, insulted, and mocked, but not on the basis of any reasoned rebuttal. The most common response was some variation on the theme that I was lying. I was eventually invited to leave the forum and asked not to engage in further discussion.
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Yes, I know that it was a foolish waste of my time, but I did come away with some interesting insights into human nature and the FE cult mindset. Reason and evidence are not the ingredients that have led them to their understanding of reality, so reason and evidence will never be part of the solution that will help them to accept the world as it is, rather than as they want it to be.
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We all have blind spots and it’s very likely that all of us believe things that aren’t true. Hopefully most of our misconceptions involve much less important matters than the shape of our planet, the reliability of the scientific method, or the very nature of reality. The whole experience made me resolve to be less dogmatic and sometimes I actually manage it.
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Why is there the "flat" earth debate?
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Curt Thurston, Owner at KMC Trading BV (2013-present)
Updated Sep 4, 2017 · Author has 425 answers and 1.5m answer views


Originally Answered: Will the flat earth/globe earth debate ever end? How long till there is absolute truth on the subject?

You wouldn’t be asking this question five years ago.

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There’s been very little debate about the shape of the earth since the bronze age, it wasn’t until simpletons like rapper B.o.B. looked at the horizon and said the most profound statement since “Cogito ergo sum”
“If it looks flat, it must be flat”
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(B.o.B. dropped out of junior high school in the 8th grade to pursue a career in music)
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After that people like Eric Dubay discovered that stupid people would sit through four hour You Tube videos as long as they had music, fancy graphics and a mesmerizing delivery and he could make tens of thousands of dollars from it.
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They found that people would eat up information as long as it sounded reasonable and they didn’t have more than a junior high school grasp of science.
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They’re also not above lying like Dave Murphy who wrote an open letter to Neil Tyson with 13 questions. In two he outright lied, in one he sped up a video so he could lie about it and in the others he just demonstrated his ignorance of science, physics and math.
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I and many other people disproved his 13 questions using actual evidence and what did Dave do? He hid our replies so the only the original poster could see them, but nobody else. I thought my posts were there but nobody was reacting to them. I signed out of my account and my posts were gone.
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TLDR; As long as dishonest people can make a buck off stupid people, the flat earth “debate” will continue.

As long as stupid people quote stupid people, the globe will continue.

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From the OP:

Anyone that’s ever interacted with an actual FE adherent knows that they will reject all evidence that the earth is any shape other than flat. 

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True statement! 
Flat-earthers like happenby and Smedley the Chicken Butler are examples of this. You both reject all evidence that the earth is any shape other than flat. Furthermore, you then lie about it, claiming that no evidence of earth's curvature has been presented. This amounts to saying that SINCE you have a different reality in your mind, THEREFORE anything that conflicts with your (false) reality must not exist! IOW the being (existence) of contradictory evidence is what you deny, since it is not in agreement with your fantasy.
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Depending on your disposition, it can be pretty entertaining to watch them struggle through the dissonance that arises when they attempt to reconcile their unshakable faith in their world view with facts that contradict it.

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For sure! 
All these threads on CI in the "ghetto" are proof positive of how flat-earthers keep struggling through the dissonance arising from their trying to shake of troublesome facts that contradict their Shangri-La, dreamland, gloden-calf, false-god, flat-earthism.

Somebody sure keeps struggling through the dissonance arising from his trying to shake troublesome facts that contradict his Shangri-La, dreamland, gloden-calf, false-god, globalism.

The reason earths cosmology matters, is that everything NASA has ever said about it directly opposes what the Bible says about it. If we are to trust our government and NASA for anything, we have to push God's word aside to make room for these lies. If earth is flying around the sun at 66,600 mph, then the Bible must be incorrect when it says the circle of earth is fixed, and immovable.



Likely, NASA and the gov would say the UN logo is no different than all other flat maps of the globe.  They all eschew flat earth because their science is all about the globe. 


Applause for all that's good in this post. :applause:

The reason earths cosmology matters, is that everything NASA has ever said about it directly opposes what the Bible says about it. If we are to trust our government and NASA for anything, we have to push God's word aside to make room for these lies. If earth is flying around the sun at 66,600 mph, then the Bible must be incorrect when it says the circle of earth is fixed, and immovable. If we are to believe the inspired word of God in the Bible... Then we might want to look more towards the United Nation's globalist agenda flag for a visual idea of Earth's Cosmology. Ive had a very long emotional journey to come to this point, and Id like anyone to prove to me NASA, space agencies, scientists and tv stars like Bill Nye are at least telling the truth about the the shape of our world. I think these scientists hate God. And they want to hide the truth with lies so astounding, that we hate God too. "For whoever so loveth the world, the love of the Father is not in him." Belief in a Flat-Earth has become an excellent way to identify yet another group of mental-inadequates for the coming human cull. Along with "convicted criminals in jail," "folks who send money to televangelists," "Americans who voted for Hillary" and "Hominids that shout allahu akbar (الله أكبر)," this group could be culled quite easily without affecting the economy of the planet or adversely affecting the future progress of the human race, with minimal fuss and social upheaval around the globe. Thank you, Flat-Earthers we commend you for your coming sacrifice for the good of the normal humans!

Why would NASA tell the truth about the shape but lie about the overall universe?
A sudden burst of altruism? 
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They lied about ALL of it:
The shape
The age
The arrangement
How it was made
How we got here
They lied about ALL of it.

                                               the 
Sun would appear to "rise" again.

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Prove it.

Why not just use an elevator? Afraid of heights?
Besides, if the earth were "flat" all you should need is a zoom lens camera, like Ladislaus likes to say.
Or, are you talking about what the OP describes, which was done by using a telephone?