Quote:
Originally Posted by Dadhawk
Membership in the primary organized group that champions the idea most certainly is relevant as it speaks to the seriousness of the group.
Your argument about whether or not all Christians or Atheists belong to some organized group doesn't really prove anything more than you believe mine does. There are millions of organized Christians in the world (I can't speak for Atheists and their organizations, although that would seem to go against its very principle) but very few organized Flat Earthers.
The bottom line is that Flat Earthers are a small percentage of the general population. There are probably more My Little Pony fanatics in the world than Flat Earthers that really believe.
Also, I'm not really convinced that Flat Earthers care any less about the environment they live in than the general population.
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It may mean absolutely nothing. Could you point to a central QAnon organization or membership society? Yet all the small groups and YouTube channels coalesce around the same ideas, so does it mean there aren't many QAnon people? Of course not. You are trying to draw a one to one association between membership and prevalence of the idea, and all I was saying with my example is beliefs can supersede membership, and yet, you seem to be ignoring the data I've presented, so I'll restate: 7% or 11 million Brazilians believe the earth is flat, so these aren't trivial numbers. The US survey I posted found 2% of those surveyed believed the earth was flat with many more saying they were unsure, so again, millions, not hundreds or a few thousand.
Is the membership necessary? Does it cost something to join? What does a person gain by joining the group? Does the group serve a purpose, and does that purpose depend on people becoming members? Do people want to be apart of the group or to have their beliefs potentially made public? If I made an International Globe Earth Society with a core value to promote the acceptance to the globe model for Earth, and if that society only garnered five thousand members then would that be indicative that only a few people believed the earth was a globe?
Again, the point of the example I made using flat earthers was that even ridiculous claims can have massive support and can be backed with all types of arguments and pseudoscience/pseudo-evidence. How does a person believe scientists when it comes to all sorts of things in the face of contrarians who present misinformation and claim the opposite? What criteria does someone use to believe scientists about the earth being a globe and not believing, as flat earthers do, that there is a global conspiracy by a world power to cover up the truth that the world is flat...how is that position dismissed, yet people believe there is a global conspiracy from a world order to manipulate scientists to put out a false narrative that there is anthropogenic global warming, so this world order can make money switching to green technology, control us and deprive us of cheap oil? These two things are at odds. Like a flat earther, climate change deniers present their arguments, and people eat it up, and while many eat up what flat earthers have to say, far more have bought into the climate denier narrative, so I'm wondering what criteria do they use to dismiss the scientific consensus on this issue and not on other issues.