Simple Ignorance

We do, unfortunately, like simple answers, even to complex questions.  

This morning I drove to the east side of town to watch the Tucson Old Timers play baseball:  "The Oldest Baseball Team in the World".  The TOTs have been playing baseball for forty years, but the "Oldest" part refers to the age of the team members, not the team itself.  You have to be at least sixty years old to join the team.  

I thought about one of the guys who died several years ago.  We were preparing a temporary field for a game, and while we waited for the team members to arrive, he explained to me that he knew exactly how the world was going to end.  It had something mysterious to do with Israel, and godless Democrats, and Palestine, and the Wicked Witch of the West.  I remember thinking of Liberal, Kansas, and the Yellow Brick Road.  

He knew exactly how the world was going to end!  

Part of the convincing power of religions is the dismal belief that complex life has simple answers.  Let me give two examples that plague us every day:  one from religion, one from biology.  

For example, consider the number of people who think that all they have to do to know how the world is going to end is to read the Bible.  Or think of the number of people who believe that if they read the Gospel of Mark, or John, or whatever New Testament book, they are reading just exactly what Jesus said.  They have not a clue that the very best scholars in the world know that we might not know more than a few fragments of what Jesus probably said; that what we have are the beliefs of early Christians, not transcripts from the 1st century.   The New Testament documents, alone, were written over a period of about a century, and they reflect, not what happened so much as what people believed about what happened.  

For several years, we went to a coffee shop at which a group of very angry men met once a week, who read their Bibles and explained to each other exactly how the world was going to end.  They just read the words, and said, "See!  That is how it is!"  

The result of such an ignorant view of what the Biblical documents are is ignorance:  horrible ignorance, almost delusional ignorance.  

As a second example, think about the current political debate about marriage, and conception, and rape, and birth control, and abortion.  People want a simple answer, and the simple answer is that a fertilized ovum is a human being.  "Well," people ask, "is it or isn't it?"

No, it isn't a human being.  It is a fertilized egg.  It has, within it, the ability to become a human being.  An acorn isn't an oak tree, but it might become one, in time.  An egg isn't a chicken, but it might become one.  Becoming human is a long process.  It begins somewhere, and gradually develops.  

We have a new grandson.  We have been watching him discover the world around him, watching him discover his hands, discover that he can make sounds something like talking.  He is becoming a human being.  His brain is developing at such a rate that we are astounded.  But it is a development.  

Someday, like me, he will start to wear out, and what used to work rather well will not do so, any longer.  We develop, and eventually, drift off.  If we are lucky, we will reach our end times before there is nothing left but drool.  

Life is not a simple process.  It is astoundingly complex.  We become fully functioning human beings gradually, and in time, lose some of what we used to be.  Lots of human beings know that they are not what they used to be.  

It is ignorance to look at something as marvelously complex as life and think that there has to be an on/off switch.  Machines have on/off switches; not living things.  Living things come to be, gradually, over time.  

Unfortunately, religions and politicians--both--are very good at giving simple answers to complex questions.