I'm not exactly a lexicon of FE ideas, but my basic understanding of "Bendy Light" is that it's supposed to explain phenomena such as ships disappearing over the horizon. Enlighten and correct me if I'm wrong.
So I'll make a concession and say that there is bendy light and that the Earth is indeed flat. Set up an observer at ground level on the edge of the ocean shore, and have her observe a faraway ship. By the BL hypothesis, as the ship gets farther away, light will be bent and she will see less and less of the ship.
What proponents of this hypothesis don't realize is that even if BL and FE are true, the observer will still be able to see the entire ship, no matter how far away it is; the ship will just be distorted. Oh, and there's another even bigger consequence of the theory: if the Earth is flat, then Bendy Light will make the observer see the Earth as if she were standing inside a huge bowl.
Think about a particular point on the ship, say, the top of the stern. Under non-BL conditions, a photon leaving this point will travel in a line until it reaches our observer's eye. BL says that if the ship is far away, this photon will be deflected enough that it never reaches the observer.
But now consider another photon emitted from the same point that, under non-BL conditions, travels above the observer and never reaches her eye. Now, by the BL hypothesis, this photon, if moving at the proper angle, will eventually be deflected so that it DOES reach the observer's eye. No matter what point you are considering on the ship, there will always be a photon traveling at a particular angle so that it is deflected to the observer.
I find it absolutely hilarious that FEers take faith in obscure and questionable interpretations of complicated branches of science such as EM and Relativity to explain bendy light, while doubting a basic scientific conclusion like the Earth being round.
Extend this reasoning to photons emitted from any point on faraway water or land on a flat Earth. If a photon leaves a point on the ocean at an angle, say, 15 degrees to the horizontal and is bent so that it reaches the observer at 0 degrees to the horizontal, then the observer will actually see that point being directly in front of her, because the photon entered her eye perpendicularly. Keep thinking about other points at different distances, and it's clear that the BL hypothesis creates a world reminiscent of a giant cereal bowl.
No high-end physics involved, just a basic understanding of light and optics. I apologize if someone else has said this already; I didn't really feel like taking the time to glean through thousands of pages of forums.
I will make the addendum that light never ever bends, not even in a gravitational field. Light always follows a geodesic, which is a straight line in curved space-time. Even though the light appears to bend to us, it is actually going in the straightest line possible and undergoes no acceleration. Photons are not .000000000037 or whatever fraction the mass of an electron, as I read somewhere on this forum; they have no mass at all, which is why they move at, well, the speed of light. I will also add that I find it hilarious that FE'ers take for granted complicated scientific theories such as Relativity or obscure electromagnetic laws that might explain BL, while completely rejecting the basic, scientifically-derived conjecture that the Earth is