I’ve recently been in debate with so-called ‘Flat-Earthers’. The main tenet of their belief is right there in the name.
The ‘Flat-Earthers’ not only doubt that the world is spherical, but deduce from this that all the sciences are false, being designed solely to further the cause of those dark forces who seek to control humankind using lies and deceit.
The most notorious example of this kind of thinking is their claim that the US expeditions to the moon never took place.
I have also for many years been in constant debate with Zionists, those who believe that Jews should have their own nation-state, and that it should be in the land from where Jews according to Scripture were expelled some two thousand years ago.
To this end, modern Israel has taken upon itself the task, using every kind of violence and intimdation, of subjugating the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine for whom Palestine is their ancient ancestral home.
Now, I have a huge problem with both of Flat-Earthery and Zionism, which is their mutual willingness to ignore whatever rational, demonstrable and objectively-arrived-at evidence contradicts their own fallacious analyses, these analyses being based on propaganda, half-truths, misconceptions and prejudices.
They also have a well-practised ability to manufacture evidence and present it as proof. In the case of the Flat-Earthers by creating simplistic and often irrational hypotheses, and in the case of the Zionists by writing their own very partial version of history: all of this is then put forward as irrefutable fact.
The Flat-Earthers also make a claim that that Zionists do: that those of us who contradict them with actual evidence, with observable fact, have all been ‘brainwashed’.
They are also all very good at refusing to acknowledge uncomfortable questions when they’re asked. Their response to that generally is to do one of two things: ask diversionary questions, of the kind now commonly referred to as ‘what-aboutery’, or make personal, even abusive, comments regarding any given individual who disagrees with them, ‘gaslighting’, as it is now termed.
Now, I can’t claim to know everything, and I admit there are many, many questions I can’t answer, not till I’ve done the research anyway. But I know enough to know that what I have been taught about certain subjects has by-and-large been accurate, because the evidence has been overwhelming, and stands up to every kind of logical and methodical scrutiny.
Of course I don’t have to like what I know: I’ve had to modify my political views a few times in my life when I have learned that my judgments have been based on ignorance and I have believed in things which were untrue.
But like every-one else, I have to accept truth when it presents itself, and the fact, which gives me no cause to lose any sleep, that the earth is spherical is one of them.
As indeed is the fact, which has definitely kept me awake at nights, that the nation my grandparents helped found and which I used to believe represented hope for the Jewish people, is governed by the kind of ghastly politics I have opposed for as long as I have been able to think.
Regarding Israel, when I became aware of the contradiction between the actual truth and what was being presented to me by the Zionists as truth, I spent a lot of time trying, painfully, to somehow reconcile the two, an impossible struggle I expect many other Jews have also faced when confronting both the inhumanity of the Holocaust and the inhumanity of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
In the end, of course, there could be no reconciliation. I had to accept that Israel was nothing like what I wanted it to be and ought to be.
It was far easier to accept that the earth, the solar-system, the galaxies even unto the farthest reaches of observable space, were and are much as they have always been represented to me.
Flat-Earthers, Zionists, both deal in fantasy and cannot accept it when they hear all the reasonable and factual alternatives to their fantasy.
I’m not going debate with ‘Flat-Earthers’ any more; there’s no point to it.
Sadly, I can’t let the Zionists and Israel go. At least the Flat-Earthers aren’t killing people.
This is a brief summary of my thinking on this topic. I will be expanding on many of these issues at one point or another in the future.