8/23/2023 0 Comments Join the flat earth societyThe Flat Earth Society was originally formed as the Universal Zetetic Society in 1884, after the Greek word zeteo, "to seek". He was also happy to fly from the US to Britain, but says an aircraft that flew over the Antarctic barrier would drop from the sky, and from the planet. But, while many flat Earthers have problems with the idea of orbiting satellites, Shenton navigates the London streets using GPS. Inevitably, Shenton's argument forces him down all kinds of logical blind alleys – the non-existence of gravity, and his argument that most space exploration, and so the moon landings, are faked. The sun and moon are spherical, but much smaller than mainstream science says, and they rotate around a plane of the Earth, because they appear to do so. The Earth is flat, he argues, because it appears flat. The height and substance of that, no one is absolutely sure, but most people think it's mountains with snow and ice." "There is no unified flat Earth model," Shenton suggests, "but the most commonly accepted one is that it's more or less a disc, with a ring of something to hold in the water. The scientific evidence is stacked against Shenton, obviously, just as it is against those who think global warming is a hoax and that the dead stalk the Earth as ghosts – but that doesn't appear to trouble him in the least. If you thought that flat Earthism was gone, think again. Countries, according to him, spread across this flat world as they appear to do on a map, with Antarctica as a ring of mountains strung around the edge. For when Shenton rides his motorbike, he says it is not gravity that pins him to the road, but the rapid upward motion of a disc-shaped planet. He is mainstream on most issues, but not all. He thinks the evidence for man-made global warming is strong, and he dismisses suggestions that his own government was involved with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The 33-year-old American, originally from Virginia but now living and working in London, is happy with the work of Charles Darwin. At his death he was attempting to reconstruct the 2000 names in the FES membership - some of whom (such as this writer) were not believers.In fact, Shenton turns out to have resolutely mainstream views on most issues. Marjory Johnson's death several years ago and a fire that destroyed Society mailing lists and documents to severely limit Johnson's activities in his last years. Laurie Godfrey, New York: WW Norton, 1983, 283-99). Robert Schadewald befriended Johnson and his wife Marjory, writing several articles on the movement that illustrated the intellectual history and themes linking the creationist movement with both flat-earth and geocentrist belief ( see, for examples, Schadewald's "Looking for lighthouses" in Creation/Evolution 1992 12 : 1-4 and his "The evolution of Bible-science" in Scientists Confront Creationism, ed. The Flat Earth Society traced its roots to the Universal Zetetic Society, founded in England in 1832 by Sir Birley Rowbotham, author of Earth Not a Globe. (The moon landing was a Hollywood stunt actually filmed near Johnson's trailer home in the Mojave Desert or perhaps in Arizona. He had proof he was eager to share that the sun is 32 miles wide and 3000 miles from earth (just a bit closer than Heaven) and that John Kennedy and his close friend "Nicky" Khrushchev worked together to foment the hoax of a space race and moon landing in order to make a fortune for their friends. Johnson often showed people a photograph of his wife in Australia, noting that she was standing upright and not hanging upside down by her toes as she would have to have done had the world been a GREASEBALL. Many creationists resented being lumped with Johnson, but they actually shared his logic and approach to science, relying on scripture as the ultimate authority in science and demanding that "common sense" and direct observation were the only tools needed or even allowed in scholarship. "Greaseball" was his universal term for round-earthers who, he noted, would obviously slide off a spherical earth. His flamboyant newsletter was contemptuous of fellow creationists who accepted GREASEBALL EARTH THEORY (he tended to capitalize every third word or so) because they were not true biblical literalists. He sincerely believed that a literal reading of the Bible required one to recognize that the world is flat. Johnson succeeded the late Samuel Shenton of Dover, England, as head of the often-ridiculed organization, which steadfastly opposed evolution and most of the physics, geology, and astronomy of the past half millennium.Īs former NCSE president Bob Schadewald stressed, Charlie was "on the level". Charles K Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Society for almost 30 years, died in March at age 76.
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