Sometimes I just sit around thinking about things. I know, it’s a dangerous habit to get into, but on occasion I can’t help myself. The other day I got to thinking about dumb things people believe, such as various off-the-wall conspiracy theories, alternative medicine bullshit, crackpot “scientific” theories, and other crap like that. A question occurred to me while I sat there pondering. What is the absolute dumbest, most ridiculous and demonstrably false belief that a large number of people never-the-less believe? What belief could have mountains of evidence stacked up against it, and yet still appeal to a large number of believers?

Right away I ruled out religion, for two reasons. One is the simple practical reason of not wanting to be at the center of a shit storm if I started talking smack about Jebus on the interwebs. Sure, as Eric Bischoff says, Controversy Creates Cash, but it also creates headaches I don’t particularly feel like dealing with. Second is the fact that religion simply isn’t falsifiable at its core, so it falls outside the realm of what I was looking for.

So, after setting aside religion and other forms of mysticism based on faith, I sat and thought for awhile about the subject. I thought about moon hoaxers, 9/11 conspiracy nuts, various Illuminati and NWO-type conspiracy theories, and of course the many JFK assassination and “Elvis is alive!” theories. None of them really fit the bill, though, for various reasons. Some aren’t readily falsifiable, some are credible enough at first blush to suck in a lot of people who don’t think too critically about things in the first place, and some just aren’t “out there” enough. (Regardless of what you think really happened or what the majority of the evidence points to, it’s not a huge stretch to think that maybe the mob had JFK whacked.)

Finally, I settled on an answer. Flat Earthers. The Flat Earth Society traces its lineage back to one Samuel Rowbotham, who advanced a theory called Zetetic Astronomy that was based on his particular brand of biblical literalism, which held that the Earth was a flat disc. Now, right away you’ll think I’m cheating, because while I promised not to bring religion into this, it appears that most flat-earthers come to their beliefs because of a particular interpretation of the Christian Bible. While this may be true, and it is a fact that the founders of the movement were all literalists, the modern flat Earth movement, beginning in 1956 with the founding of the International Flat Earth Society, is a much more secular movement focusing intently on alternate scientific theories to “prove” the Earth is a disc.

Now, in case you didn’t know (and I was taught several contradictory things in school, so this isn’t surprising), the spherical shape of the Earth isn’t a modern discovery by any stretch of the imagination. Ancient Greek philosophy correctly argued that the Earth was spherical, and Eratosthenes made indirect measurements of its circumference to within 20% of its true value as early as 240 BC. It’s simply not true (as I was once taught in school) that Christopher Columbus had trouble getting sailors for his attempt to reach China and India by sailing west from Spain because most people in those days thought the world was flat and he’d fall off the edge. It is in fact more likely that they knew better than Columbus what a great distance it was from Spain to China going westward, and wouldn’t agree to the voyage because they thought it foolhardy. Columbus was underestimating the circumference of the Earth by a large margin, in direct contradiction to the then-current scientific consensus. (It turned out, of course, that Columbus was wrong, but thankfully for him and his men there was a huge landmass in the way anyhow that stopped them before they ran out of provisions.) So flat-earthers aren’t just objecting to some modern theory they don’t understand. They’re going against knowledge that has been established fact since nearly the dawn of human civilization.

So what exactly do flat-earthers claim? Well, according to their own FAQ, they… don’t know, precisely. There are apparently a few different, mutually exclusive theories of flat earthiness. One claims that the Earth is actually a cylinder accelerating endlessly through space (along with the sun, moon, and stars, which are only about 3000 miles overhead). We live on the “top” of the cylinder, so to us the planet is a flat disc, and the acceleration is what makes us stick to it. Another model posits that “dark energy” is what causes gravity and somehow also keeps the sun, moon, and stars from falling down on our heads. Yeah, I don’t get that one either.

All the theories have several things in common, however. The sun and moon are about 32 miles in diameter and about 3000 miles away. They orbit above the “equator” of the flat-disc earth, and their light is uni-directional, like a spotlight, so they only illuminate one part of the disc at a time. This explains sunrises and sunsets as matters of perspective, as you see the sun rising as it gets closer and setting as it gets farther away and vanishes at the vanishing point. This doesn’t really make much sense, since it would seem to me that if this were the case, instead of seeing the sun set in the west, we’d watch until it dwindled away to a small point of light and then went out. But flat-earthers apparently have this figured out. I’m sure it has something to do with dark energy.

According to flat-earthers, the geography of the Earth is that of a flat disc, with the north pole in the middle and a large ice wall (which keeps the water from falling off the edge!) circling the outer edge. Some flat earthers believe Antarctica is a continent separate from the great ice barrier, while others claim that the ice barrier itself is what keeps getting mistaken for Antarctica. Lunar eclipses, which here in the non-kooky real world are caused by the spherical Earth casting a round shadow on the surface of the moon, are explained by adding something called an “anti-moon” that occasionally passes between the sun and the moon and casts a shadow on the moon. Wait, hang on. Didn’t they just get done claiming the sun only shines in one direction? So how does its light even reach the moon in the first place, since they are both supposedly circling endlessly above the flat Earth at the same altitude? Man, I better not think about this too hard or my head will explode.

In flat-earth cosmology, space flight is impossible, so that necessarily means that all claims by anybody or any government to the contrary are necessarily false. They posit a grand conspiracy to keep the true shape of the planet secret. All the photographs that show a spherical Earth are fakes, and of course the whole moon landing was a hoax. Why do conspirators do this? Well, so they can take those VAST sums of money spent on NASA (a whopping one-half of one percent of the entire Federal budget) and spend it on hookers and blow instead of space exploration. Which is impossible anyhow, remember.

In a final bit of mind-numbing idiocy, when asked why they’re convinced there is a world conspiracy to hide the true shape of the world, they respond, basically, with “The Earth is flat. Everybody at NASA and the other world space agencies say it isn’t. Therefore, they are lying and there is a conspiracy among them to cover up the true shape of the planet!” If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that was a textbook example of begging the question.

I could go on for days, but the more I think about it the more my eyes start to lose focus and my brain cries out in pain, so I’ll stop here. But I challenge you to find a dumber widely-held belief than this.