Thank you for the detailed explanation, without vitriol or hatred. Did your friend return to globalist thinking?

It's funny, because I think similarly to you about child abuse; except, I think that teaching children in their first classroom that we're on a globe spinning madly in many different directions, but that we feel no change in forces, ever, to be quite confusing to fragile little minds. Generally, it's not children that learn this -- it's adults, who start questioning. Most children get the government-school indoctrination.

I really enjoyed the book, "Zetetic Astronomy" by Dr. Samuel Rowbotham. It describes many experiments, which either showed flatness, or failed to show a globe. Some of those experiments have been reproduced recently, with lasers, showing the same results but with greater resolution.

Oh, and in reference to your "cult" wording, I don't follow anyone -- I just learned some new data, which violated the model I had built up in my mind; and then, I changed the model, rather than rejecting the new data. There's a great book by Richard Maybury, the first of his "Uncle Eric" series, in which he describes how we create mental models, and then generally defend them. I've been blessed with a missing eye, so the neurons that would have gone to service the input from that eye, got repurposed -- which helps me to find more connections than most. Not necessarily "more intelligent" but I tend to loop things through my mind and find weird connections that way. Anyway, that first book is titled "Uncle Eric Talks About Personal, Career, and Financial Security (An Uncle Eric Book)", and is at Amazon here.

I understand that we won't see eye-to-eye on this one (which I just realized, in review, is a reference to my birth defect). Still, I upvoted you, and take care.