Have you ever stood out in your own back yard, wherever that may be, and noticed just how obvious it is that the Earth is flat? Just look around you. Does the Earth look like an oversized egg floating in the vast vacuum of stellar and interstellar space? Can you really see the surface of the Earth falling away in a distance?

Most of us have been through the mandatory term of not less than 13 years in the public temples where the priests delivered sermons about the shape and nature of the Earth. I was there too. How can you forget how silly people who disagreed with this conclusion were made to seem? Step back into your own back yard and see how obvious the flatness of the Earth actually is.

Now, I can hear the turbulence in ‘the force’ caused by the great multitudes who argue that they have been convinced of the roundness of the Earth. Forgetting that round is a 2-D shape and that the only flat 3-D surface is a perfect sphere, you are more likely able to defend the fact that you believe that the Earth is round than you are to be able to defend the fact that the Earth is an oblate spheroid. Yes, that means round as you say it.

That leads me to my point. You can go through the rest of your lives believing that the Earth is riding around in a pond of stars on the back of a giant tortoise. It will effect neither your quality nor quantity of life if you know nothing of cosmology or physics. It’s okay not to know everything. None of us does know everything. The problem is in not understanding that none of us knows everything.

We’ve come to live in fear because we now live in awe of people who know as little about the world around us as we do. A recent article, silently corrected, gave figures on global warming stating that Alaska’s summer temperature had risen by 6 degrees a year since 1950. Joseph Farah, of WorldNetDaily, called them on this. Alaska’s summer temperature did not really rise by 336 degrees in the last 56 years. This is only one example.

Ignorance becomes dangerous when it masquerades as knowledge. Living our lives, most of us do not have the time, resources or skill to confirm what we are told about the world around us. It is more important that you be able to balance a checkbook than that you can recite the Nobel Gasses in order of atomic weight. You will have to do the former more than the latter. Don’t know the capital of Alaska? That’s okay. As long as the people who have to know these facts do know them, the rest of us never have to bother with any of it.

As I wrote, it’s okay not to know everything. Just remember that this is just as true of the guy sitting next to you and the guy reading the teleprompter to you. Let the world keep its mystery. That’s one of the joys of life. We do not have to do God’s job for him.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 at 3:49 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.