When you actually consider flat earth to possibly be real, do you ever at any point ask yourself, “is any of this actually true or is there a different, more rational explanation?”
For example, a typical flat earth talking point is about the sun changing size or lack thereof during a sunset. Eric Dubay, during that film of his, “LEVEL”, around the 12 minute mark, claims the sun is local and shrinks in size as it goes lower into the horizon because in “reality” it’s just getting further away from you. And then he contradicts that claim by then saying the reason the sun doesn’t shrink is because of “atmospheric lensing.” Like the atmosphere works like a magnifying glass. Then he showed sun glare on the camera lens and said “this alone proves a local sun.”
So okay, he made two positive claims. Let’s analyze them. Let’s “research” it.
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“The sun shrinks in size as it goes further away from you.” No it doesn’t. Grab a solar filter to remove the sun’s glare and voila, sun stays the same size throughout the entire day. This also disproves his second claim.
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“Atmospheric lensing magnifies the sun.” With a solar filter, this is proven to not be true. And even if “atmospheric lensing” did magnify the sun, why doesn’t it magnify airplanes or mountains or distant cities? You want to have your cake and eat it too. I checked, I couldn’t find any sources that could verify if “atmospheric lensing” was even a real thing or if that’s just something Eric Dubay came up with.
Okay, so see what I did there? There was two claims made by a flat earther. If you became a flat earther, at some point, you had to have come across this exact kind of claim. What I looked up to dispel the claims took like two google searches, less than 3 minutes.
So obviously I committed to what you flat earthers said I should do. However, I looked into a claim but found it to be untrue. At some point during your road to becoming a flat earther, you had to have come across claims like the ones I debunked. You’d had to have either accepted his explanation or were skeptical of his explanation. If you were skeptical, which I’m sure you had to have been, surely you guys would’ve reached a similar conclusion I did right? And not just the claims about the sun, but just any claim you felt unsure about, right?
I’m not letting my feelings about what shape the earth is dictate my research. I simply heard a claim, was skeptical, researched it, concluded the claim was wrong.
So this is why I’m so confused about the flat earth belief as a whole. Does it matter if you’re unsure of a certain claim other flat earthers prop up?
Is it bad to ask other flat earthers if they’re sure about a claim you yourself are unsure about? Are you just ultimately afraid of being judged negatively? Surely you aren’t sold on everything they claim flat earth to be. Surely there’s at least one thing that you think to yourself, “even I find that hard to believe.” right?
Is this whole thing just an emperor’s new clothes situation where everyone has to pretend it makes sense, even if you the individual aren’t sure of certain things?
Because everyday I’m becoming more and more convinced this whole thing is just an Emperor’s new clothes situation.
EDIT: I did further research about “atmospheric lensing.” And apparently it is a real phenomenon where too much atmosphere can heavily distort the apparent trajectory of an object but I couldn’t find any confirmation that it “magnifies” the sun in any way.
“https://reddit.com/r/FlatEarthIsReal/comments/1fowbk0/are_you_sure_every_claim_about_flat_earth_is_true/”>View Reddit by Omomon – View Source