Peace, my brother.
Go back to page one and read the excerpt I quoted from East Coker. Particularly the standalone line.
Then have your partner give you a large hug from me, and pour you something that will relax you and make you forget about conflicts.
I’ve never seen Titanic, nor will I ever do so.
I couldn’t care less about the next Matrix movie.
I’ve never read any of the Harry Potter books.
Now, I wouldn’t say that I’m especially “proud” of my lack of knowledge; I’m fairly apathetic. However, I suppose one could say that I “make it a point” not to see Titanic, read about the next Matrix movie, or read Harry Potter.
However, according to the gobear standard, my “militant ignorance” of these subjects is “inexcusable.” Another word, found in the thread title, would be “vile” (more on that later).
So, gobear, am I to be reviled for my willful ignorance?
Or am I not, because these three examples are fairly trivial in the long run when compared to religion? If that’s your answer, then I’ve gotta side with jinwicked, Shayna, and whoever else – religion interests YOU personally, and while it’s pretty much an objective fact that religion has influenced the world in a big fashion (understatement), for you to decree that we MUST know about religion is pretty fucking arrogant of you.
Yeah, knowledge of religion is great. I really does help you understand literary allusions, art, music, and so forth much more completely. But if you don’t know that the serpent in a story is symbolic of the Devil… big fuckin’ deal. Snakes are scary regardless. You ain’t missing out on a crucial element of life.
Lemme put it this way – I know fuckall about music. But I can listen to Beethoven and really enjoy the hell out of it. Sure, I can’t tell you what notes he’s playing, and maybe you can. Does that mean you get more out of it? Perhaps. But you’re just a smug bastard if you rub my nose in that fact, and I’ll gladly tell you what other part of my body you can rub.
I study chemistry, and will have my Ph.D. “soon.” Do I enjoy a painting more than you do, just because I can tell you what the oxidation state of the metals in the pigments are? Does a physicist enjoy a roller coaster more simply because she knows kinematics? Are either one of us scientists allowed to call you “vile” because you aren’t interested in the same things we are, and therefore have “made a point” to not study these sciences?
And about the phrase “Ignorant atheism is as vile as ignorant fundamentalism”… that’s horseshit, gobear. Who would you rather have in charge of the world – Marley23 or Jack T. Chick? Is ignorant atheism a “good thing”? No, but it’s hardly the evil promulgated by His4Ever.
Again, you’re proud of what you don’t know. In my book, that makes you and **His4ever[/v] on the same level.
Well the story of Adam and Eve isn’t about scary snakes, but about temptation. Right there, you missed the entire point of the story.
And where did I say you must learn about religion? If you wish to remain an ignorant dumbshit the rest of your life, afraid to step outside your comfort zone, go ahead.
The very fact that you think that religon is represented by Jack Chicxk and His4ever shows how little you know about the world’s religions. I prefer to think that religion is better represented by the Sleeping Buddha at Wat Po in Bangkok, or Aya Sophia in Istanbul, or Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion.” Man’s impulses to the divine can be found in Paradise Lost, Chartres Cathedral, the rock garden at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, the Parthenon, the poems of Rumi, the Blue Mosque of Isfahan, and the Egyptian Hymn to the Sun.
Dismiss the religious impulse, and you dismiss a good chunk of the world’s art, literature, and history. ’
Whether you know it or not, you are the poorer for closing your eyes to beauty and wisdom that can be found in the outpouring of the human hunger for divinity.
Well, I give up this argument, gobear uses too many big words for my feeble, wicked little mind.
I’m going to go watch American Idol now, I taped it so I didn’t miss WWE Smackdown.
(it’s taking longer than we thought)
Seriously though, any one person’s world view will be filtered by their own experiences and interests. Religion, while undisputably being a significant factor in human history, is just one of many facets of the world in which we live, and just one of the many things which influence the way we filter information. I am atheist myself, and admittedly do not know much about any specific religion, but I think that to imply ignorance as a result is a bit of a stretch. My own interests tend toward the pragmatic and tangible - if I were to suggest that not being familiar with the nuances of particle physics implied ignorance, would that not be a similar viewpoint to the OP? Physics (physical properties) can influence art appreciation just as much as knowing the history behind a particular piece - not ignorance, but rather another point of view - and is it not the vast array of differing interpretations of a piece that lends it its value?
As someone already mentioned in this thread, we can not know everything. Some of us place things like religion as a much lower priority than our other interests. For me, it is sufficient to know that a variety of different religions exist, encompassing a significant portion of the human population, and in the area where I live, the most predominant ones are the various denominations of Christianity. If I need to know more for whatever reason, I can always do more research, but even what little I do know appears to be sufficient to meet my daily requirements.
For what it’s worth.
-FK
I actually can see how, perhaps, someone might legitimately take pride not in the ignorance itself, but in the underlying reason for the ignorance. Suppose there were some faddish book that was popular for a couple years that most of its devotees later were embarassed to have found interesting (the general attitude of most people I know who read The Celestine Prophecy back in high school.) Might one not take pride in his ignorance as an indicator that he didn’t go in for the fad?
Or perhaps somebody might take pride in his lack of knowledge about the popular 90’s card game Magic: The Gathering, because his ignorance reveals that (unlike myself) he didn’t waste hundreds of dollars being a dork.
People on this board routinely take pride in not knowing anything about Reality TV, which is seen contemptuously by the SDMB intelligentsia as mind-numbing gobbledegook.
I don’t think apathy is all that different, ultimately, from purposefully remaining ignorant. Both reveal an underlying judgment about the value of obtaining certain knowledge. I haven’t read the Bhagavad-gita because I’m apathetic, I don’t really care to read stories about the Hindu pantheon of gods because I am judging on incomplete information about Hinduism (how can I have complete information about anything I haven’t read, the entire point is to decide whether I want complete information) that this will not hold any benefit for me. If you don’t make preliminary value judgments of that sort, you would be required to simply read everything because prioritization is based on a judgment of the likely reward for a time investment.
The people who are purposefully ignorant of some lesser known specifics about Christianity have similiarly made a value judgment. They have decided there is nothing there for them, and spend their time elsewhere. Nor is that ignorance fatal to any arguments they might make about Christianity. No matter how nuanced, any theory proposing that light waves travel through a medium called the “aether” is wrong, and I don’t have to read it to know that. The concept of the aether itself was wholly negated by experiment, so all theories within that framework can be summarily dismissed. I would purposefully avoid reading such a theory, as it would be a waste of time. Perhaps these people have decided that since there is no god, it’s a waste of time to read various religions’ manuals on interacting with god.
Well, I’ll give it a shot…
Nobody ever died for or because of Star Trek, for better or worse.
Societies were never built around or destroyed by Star Trek Fandom.
Billions of people don’t make Star Trek (or it’s variations) a part of their daily life, influencing their worldview and thinking to some degree.
Without even taking on the question of whether or not there exists a Diety (or Dieties) there are reasons to give the bible a bit more consideration than the 72 original episodes of Star Trek. If religions are works of fiction, then respect them as the greatest and most powerful works of fiction known to man. The true realist would recognise the incredible power of the judeo-christian-islamic, buddhist, taoist, hinduist memes and give them the consideration they deserve.
I take pride in my ignorance of who won on American Idol or Survivor.
All though, in American Idol’s case, it took a bit of work on my part.
I haven’t read, nor want to read, the OP or any of the following posts, but I know you are all wrong.
One short but interesting story I read in a book called "The River at the Centre of the World", proclaimed this:
The author was interviewing many people in China about the upcoming dam to be built on the Yangtze. Everyone he spoke to had a strong opinion on the dam, from how great it would be (providing clean water and power to millions – 1 in 12 people in the world live on the Yangtze) to what an environmental disaster it will cause (salination of adjacent farm lands, flooding villages etc…). He finally got to speak to the foremost dam expert in the country, who knew more about it that everyone else. The same question was asked, “What affect will the dam have, in your opinion…”
The scholar replied, after many minutes of deep thought, ”It’s complicated…”
The moral: Those with the most knowledge and the ability to clearly see and understand all sides, rarely have a definitive opinion on the matter at hand. I think that’s important to acknowledge.
An interesting thread this, and to me a good example of why debate is sooooo much better in the pit than in GD. But I digress.
A lot of this centres on what it might mean to “make a point” of not learning something. How much of that is actually just mere rhetoric? How, precisely, does one make a point of not learning something? Only, so far as I can see, by not bothering to read about or listen to anything on the subject. But how does that really differ from apathy or just plain finding something boring? One person’s point of missing something is another person’s chance to do something else.
Or let’s reverse it. There’s barely a piece of information out there that isn’t obtainable by any one of us. So why do you not know, for example, the latest mortality table used by life insurance companies? To forestall one response, let me assure you that it is most certainly a crucial piece of information. Annuities, pension products, life insurance and so on will all be priced and reserved using it and since 70%+ of the stockmarket is owned by these funds you can expect to see some pretty big impacts as a result of it changing.
I bet you’ve got no idea when they were last changed, how much it differed and when the next is due out. I bet you’ve got no idea how they’re compiled.
I bet you’d never even considered mortality tables before, eh? Why not? Why don’t you know these esoteric actuarial points that impact your whole economy? Because you simply haven’t tried to find out. Whether you call that “making a point” of not finding out or whether you call it “not being bothered enough” to find out seems pure semantic sophistry to me.
Our society and culture is riddled with crucial information. Thankfully there is someone interested enough to take care of each bit of it. By ignoring some bits, we can find out about other bits. I don’t really care if you call that “ignoring” process “making a point”, “don’t really care”, “haven’t got time” or Peter. It all amounts to the same thing in the end.
pan
Except, kabbes, if I proudly proclaimed my deliberate ignorance of mortality tables and my disdain for accounting principles in the middle of a polemic excoriating the capriciousness and cupidity of insurance companies, I wouldn’t exactly be showing apathy, would I? I think this thread is talking about the sort of agressive ignorance utilized by some to protect a narrow but strongly held point of view against any sort of actual reality-testing. It’s one strategy, I suppose, for avoiding cognitive dissonance, but it’s certainly not the best one.
re. Polycarp’s post up top…
East Coker is as close as you can get to hell on earth, so I suppose that quote was perfect for this thread 
What’s American Idol?
Hey, Poly, as someone who studies intellectual history, i am fully in sympathy with what you’re saying here. I know from my own studies that the history of thought in America (which is my area of study) cannot be understood without a strong understanding of: beliefs in the ancient period, the medieval period, the Renaissance and the Reformation; the various religions that came to North America; the responses of these religions to secularising tendencies like the Enlightenment and evolution, etc., etc., etc.
So, i believe that an understanding of the history of religion helps one to understand many aspects of the world more clearly. However, as someone who is also an atheist, my only interest in the subject is an interest in religion qua history, not religion qua religion. That is, while i seek to understand religions and role they play in history, i have no interest in subscribing to any of their worldviews or immersing myself in their practices and rituals. And sometimes, in threads like this, i get the feeling that the implied subtext of the argument is that people should take an interest in religion as religion. I know that no-one states this openly, but it’s just something that seems to permeate the general argument. And i think it gets people’s back up a bit.
While i certainly agree that claiming ignorance about a topic, and then proceeding to hold forth on that topic is a little unwise, i also don’t have quite the disdain for ignorance that some people appear to have. In this case, i am using the term “ignorance” not to mean “stupidity,” but in the sense of “lacking knowledge (about something).” In a world where we can never hope to know everything, we all must, of necessity, practice selective ignorance. There are things that we choose not to learn about because they are less important to us than other things. And given that it is quite possible to make it through life in the modern world, and to get pleasure and intellectual stimulation from that world, without knowing what the pentecost is, i’m not going to be too critical of people who don’t care about it and don’t want to know about it. Just like i don’t care whether people–religious or not–take the time to learn about evolution or genetics or historical materialism.
This is an ace thread, and a wonderful OP.
Just another point to add to the mix: the problem of knowing religion. Clearly from his OP, gobear knows pots and pots about religion, more than I ever will. But as he’s an atheist, from the Christian point of view, he’s profoundly ignorant, because he supposedly doesn’t ‘know’ God – hasn’t become a Christian, I mean. Supposedly, the most objectionable 14-year old son-of-a-fundie knows more than he does, on that score. (That’s whether objectionable fundies do really know God – I suspect that God works harder with them than the others.)
That’s all fine from the ordinary epistemological point of view, as gobear and the fundie do their thing, but it gets complicated when it comes to arguments on the Straight Dope. So many religious arguments come down to this:
Atheist: prove that God exists/that you have faith/that Jesus lives (etc).
Christian: I can’t prove it scientifically, or rationally: it’s a personal experience, different for everyone.
No matter what the atheist knows, he can’t know what the Christian knows. So, in a sense, his cultural and historical knowledge is moot. He can’t feel what St Francis felt, even if he knows his story back to front. And the argument is, in a sense, meaningless.
Please note I’m not saying atheism equals ignorance, not in the least, but I wanted to show how communication and understanding can fall down in the face of the ineffable.
If I may comment, I don’t really think that is the case in this particular thread. One cannot get significantly more atheist than gobear, Polycarp would never consider evangelizing where it wasn’t welcome, being more the “lead by example” sort, Guin’s Catholic and I think they stopped recruiting in the 18th century ;), and I, well, if anybody can figure out MY theology I’d appreciate it if they were to explain it to ME. I believe the thrust of gobear’s argument was in favor of the study of religion as it affects history, art, politics, language, literature, etc. Culture, in the social sense.
But I agree with Shayna – I don’t think that examples cited were actually doing that. Can you actually show me a case where one of the cited individuals was arguing about a subject that they cheerfully admitted that they were ignorant about?
Otherwise I have to conclude – as have others – that it is, in fact, the announcement that these people find the study of religion in particular uninspiring or of no interest that has so riled gobear. Either that or maybe he is reading a little more into the phrase “I make a point of” than I am, which personally I just read as rhetoric. It is the latter option of the two that was (I hope) the theme of my last post.
That aside:
There seems to be a pervasive idea amongst many in this thread that religious study is somehow special and that choosing that as your opt-out non-study is particularly egregious. I disagree. I can think of many subjects that I’d place higher on the list (one of which gobear himself also ranted about in the BBQ a short time ago, so I can’t fault him on that score!) In fact, I think that much of what is necessary to understand in order to gain a reasonable understanding of many of the mentioned topics (political climate, for example) is generally either understandable at a pretty damn basic level or else requires so much understanding that you have to be a real devotee to get it.
It is this attitude of the oh-so important nature of religion that has got many people’s backs up in this thread and examples have been given of this attitude that I chiefly agree with. If you don’t see it yourself then either these otherwise intelligent people are all picking up on something that doesn’t exist or you, for whatever reason, are simply missing it.
pan
As I said befor, I can’t fault anyone for a lack of interest (a point Shayna, Bill H, and Jinwicked ignored); it’s aggressive ignorance that gets up my nose.
So someone has no interest in the Pentecost, then why should that person post in a thread to inform people of that fact in disdainful language?
I’m an atheist, but I flatter myself that I am an informed one, so it really gravels me when someone trashes religion without knowing anything about it, just as it does when someone pops into a Star Trek thread and then trashes the show while proudly admitting he has never seen an episode.
Moreover, the idea that one can be proud of not knowing something is just plain mystifying. And to say, as Shayna that one would make a point of not learning is as antithetical to the Doper ethos as one can get.
More to the point, it seems to me that pointedly ignoring religion is to ignore one of the chief sources of human creativity and ingenuity.
That’s the bit that got Shayna and company so angry with me, and yet it is a point I never made and would never make. I’m an atheist and would be quite happy if nobody ever studied religion qua religion, so the idea that I’m some sort of missionary for faith mandating the study of religion is nuts. My point is and has been that one should know about religion in order to understand other areas of human endeavor, not to study religion for its own sake, with the exceptioon of making anti-religious arguments, in which case one ought to know about the target of one’s attacks.
Perhaps i should have been clearer that i wasn’t levelling an accusation at anyone in particular, especially not in this thread. It’s just that sometimes those who accuse others of being ignorant about religion seem to be making a specifically theological rather than a broadly epistemological point.