Willful Ignorance: The Chosen Mindset Of The Religious Community http://freethoughtblogs.com/alstefanelli/2012/06/04/willful-ignorance-the-chosen-mindset-of-the-religious-community/
Charles Darwin said, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” The word “ignorant” is an adjective describing a person in the state of being unaware and is often used as an insult. Of course, ignorance is not always a pejorative. There are many things I am ignorant of simply because I have not yet received knowledge. But there is an aspect of ignorance that continues to defy logic and reason that lives mostly in the realm of religious belief. We know this characteristic as “Willful Ignorance,” and it concerns how an individual chooses to interpret the reality and its connection to things proved, unproved and, of course, things that cannot be proved. Truth Or Scare… When someone tells us that something is “true,” we can choose to either accept it as such or not. For instance, say I’m at a protest and I am made aware of a boundary that the police had set up to keep protesters organized. A police officer has given me the knowledge that if I step across this line, I will be arrested. I accept this as a true statement. There is no reason to doubt it and debating it will result in a similar outcome. I can then choose my actions according to whether or not I want to be arrested. However, what if the same police officer tells me that the line is actually a barrier to an alternate universe and stepping over it will cause me to fall into an inescapable realm of fairies, trolls and invisible pink hippopotamuses? Special mushrooms notwithstanding, this is not something that I would consider warranting any further investigation. Same holds true when small children regale me with their tales of missing cookies and half-drank glasses of milk on Christmas morning. This is where religious beliefs come into play. There is enough information available from literally thousands of independent and verified sources that can explain how religious beliefs started and evolved within the human species. >From the fields of psychology, archaeology, anthropology, biology and many >other scientific disciplines come comprehensive understanding of how the human mind can come to believe. The scientific community is responsible for the discovery of knowledge and insights into so many aspects of our existence, but as these facts are revealed by our best and brightest, the faithful persist in ignoring facts in favor of superstition. Unbalanced Reality… This is the doctrine of willful ignorance. It causes such an unbalance of reality in the lives of religious believers that they’ve largely become a parody unto themselves. Willful ignorance not only sustains superstitious beliefs, but it is also responsible for why believers are so fiercely protective of their gods. The most detrimental result of willful ignorance, though, is that it causes most believers to resist that spark of skepticism that results in the journey down the path of enlightenment and remains one of the most injurious obstacles to the growth and evolution of our societies. Willful ignorance is an insult to the collective of human intelligence. Considering the vast amount of knowledge that is easily available, it is unconscionable that there remain living human beings who still believe in a young earth, creationism, the efficacy of prayer, the concept of original sin and the role that human sacrifice plays in its atonement, or any one of the literally hundreds of other aspects of religious dogma and doctrine that should have been abandoned half a century ago. While religion is blatantly responsible for a fair amount of death and destruction in the history of our species, the mental damage is worse. Religion surreptitiously wreaks havoc on the mind, which is the part of our existence that defines our species. The ability to discern fact from fiction is what advances our society. When the gene pool is infected with religious belief, it dilutes our collective evolution and stymies our intellectual growth. This is evident in the fact that people are still arguing about whether to teach creationism or the real, substantiated and irrefutably proven facts of evolution in our classrooms. This argument is so utterly incomprehensible that it makes my head ache, as do the religion-borne ideologies of racism, misogyny and bigotry, which are still widely accepted in many societies, even technologically advanced countries such as the United States and Great Britain. When an individual is presented with empirical evidence that is the result of the combined research of tens of thousands of educated and disciplined individuals, but chooses to disregard this knowledge in favor of superstition, their choice shows evidence of a mind retarded in its ability to comprehend the paradigms of reality and it susceptibility to delusional thinking. Biblical Irony… In what can only be described as one of the many ironies that are part and parcel of the bible, there is a verse that the believer uses to admonish anyone who does not believe as they do. This verse is found in the book of Romans, first chapter and it accuses the infidel of ‘exchanging the truth of god for the lie’ of anything else. What is needed is introspection on the part of the believer to understand that they are the ones guilty of exchanging truth for the illegitimate, dogmatic and dangerous doctrine of willful ignorance that their beliefs demand of them. There is a common reply given by most believers and even some of us infidels that religion is responsible for a lot of good in the world. They cite hospitals, schools and charitable organizations. While, in of themselves, these are not bad things, religion is not required for them to exist and they do not atone for the damage that religion has done thus far. The superstition that comprises religious belief had served our ancestors with the ability to explain aspects of our existence that we could not comprehend due to the lack of the proper instruments of discovery. But, by virtue of its very nature, it also bore the bigotry, discrimination, hatred and violence that still pervade our societies today. It is willful ignorance that makes religious belief the mind virus that it is, and it is the willful ignorance of religious belief that inexorably leads to a convoluted worldview. Imagine… The vast stores of knowledge that represent the evolving wisdom borne from the scientific mind is proof positive that religion is no longer relevant in a post-modern world. On a regular basis, the scientific community gives the religious many reasons to cease believing that “god did it.” On a regular basis, however, religious leaders feed their flocks with the willful ignorance of science denial. The faithful sit in their pews and listen to the spewage of myths and legends as fact. Meanwhile, the enlightened continue to facepalm as the willfully ignorant remain clueless as the overlapping of magisteria gets smaller and smaller every single day. It is, indeed, a sad commentary on the human condition that in this day and age a vast majority believe, as has been so eloquently stated, that, “Christianity is the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree” I wonder what the future holds… http://freethoughtblogs.com/alstefanelli/2012/06/04/willful-ignorance-the-chosen-mindset-of-the-religious-community/ ————————————————— Excerpted from my new book, “Free Thoughts – A Collection Of Essays By An American Atheist.” -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WebTV Dawgs/Dittos" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. 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