How do people like this even manage to exist?

Seriously, I just don't understand it. Are we so desperate for any thread of control, so scared that things happen outside the tiny context of our lives and minute piece of existence, that things like this can honestly be believed?

I was looking around the BAUT forum (pretty much a daily exercise for me. I am an absolute expert at forum lurking) when I came across a link to this amazingly insane article. Well, it's not the article that's insane, but the subject is so far out of the realm of common sense that I am stunned. it's a reprint from a 1980 issue of Science Digest, about a guy named Charles K. Johnson, head of the International Flat Earth Research Society. I just can't comprehend anyone going so far out of the way to deny everything that our eyes, ears, and common sense tells us is true. A short excerpt:

"The sun and moon, in the Johnson version, are only about 32 miles in diameter. They circle above the earth in the vicinity of the equator, and their apparent rising and setting are tricks of perspective, like railroad tracks that appear to meet in the distance. The moon shines by its own light and is not eclipsed by the earth. Rather, lunar eclipses are caused by an unseen dark body occasionally passing in front of the moon."

Occam's Razor, anyone? But there is more than that:

"Wherever you find people with a great reservoir of common sense," he says, "they don't believe idiotic things such as the earth spinning around the sun. Reasonable, intelligent people have always recognized that the earth is flat."

The irony is so thick it would float a neutron star.

I guess this goes a long way toward explaining why there will always be a market for miracle weight loss and hair growth pills. Humanity......sigh.