An article written by Tolgay Demir, a “youth leader” in an Istanbul branch of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), went viral Sept 1. Titled “The Flat Earth Theory,” the article was published on the organization’s website. In it, Demir, the deputy president of the local party organization, seriously argued that the Earth, in fact, is flat. He asserted that the “freemasons” fooled the modern world to believe that the Earth is round. The photos of the planet taken from space by NASA are “staged,” the argument went on, whereas the voyage to the moon by the Americans was nothing but a “conspiracy” to support the “round Earth myth.”

But why was there such a grand conspiracy to fool humanity about the shape of its planet? Demir gave the following answer:

“Presenting the world as a sphere, and presenting it as one of the trillions of stars and planets in the universe, devalues humans, just like the theories of evolution does. Thanks to this systemic religion of science, life is deprived of its meaning. … This leads people to become the slaves of the capitalist system.”

Demir was basically supporting the pre-Copernican worldview in which a flat Earth was deemed the center of the universe, jumping some five centuries back in science. (And, ironically, he was promoting this view through the internet, which is one of the products of the very modern science he denied.)