Skip to main content

Absolute Truth is Deliberate Ignorance

"Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free, expects what never was, and never will be."
                   --Thos. Jefferson (attributed by David McCollough)


It isn't really road rage.  It is religion rage.  They meet in a public place, ready for combat, armed with big Bibles, and read and pray and intimidate each other.  It is passive-aggressive, writ large.


They read Bible verses to each other the way satisfied people read fortune cookies, but they aren't satisfied.  As they understand it, what Paul of Tarsus or never-to-be-known editors wrote, is the word of God.  Obscure sentences become pure enlightenment, and universal demands.  


It is not unusual for there to be poorly disguised arguments.  Something Paul reputedly said about what Jesus reputedly said about what Moses reputedly said about what God reputedly said on top of Old Smoky, all covered with fire, soon turns their composure to ill-disguised ire.  


They believe they are reading magic words.  They have heard, but do not want to know, and certainly do not believe, that Jesus never wrote anything we have, that nobody recorded what he said, and that most of what they read was written thirty, or fifty, or a hundred years after Jesus died.  There are secrets there, waiting to be decoded!


They don't want to know what generations of historians and scholars know.  They want to be ignorant of those things.  They believe they are quite capable of knowing pure truth, all by themselves, although they may not agree what it is.


In some odd and strange way, many such deliberately ignorant religious believers and equally ignorant and impervious politicians are making common cause.  Political candidates memorize and recite mantras that are, if not deliberately, then conveniently, ignorant:

  • Obama was born in Kenya
  • He is not a Christian
  • Our level of taxation is brutally high
  • Government is evil
  • The less you tax, the higher government income
  • Only Christians can be moral
  • God has chosen America as his special nation
  • If the rich get really rich, the rest of us will get pretty rich
  • Obama caused this recession
  • Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11
  • Eliminating government programs will put people to work
Ignorance is not a crime.  Defending it, insisting on it, reciting it, and requiring it means that sensible conclusions and actions cannot be reached.

Religious beliefs built on deliberate ignorance are absurd, but not necessarily important.  But ignorant political beliefs are a disaster because, by the very nature of politics, it affects all of us.


The alternative to ignorance isn't truth.  Truth is an ignorant claim, too.  What we should try for, instead, is is healthy skepticism, an openness to ideas, facts, and honesty.  
.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more