January 21, 2009

• Samples from the Pie of Ignorance

  I have just read an article where a teacher was told, "if English was good enough for Jesus Christ its good enough for anyone".

  48% voted for McCain and saw nothing wrong with Palin as a vice president.
  
  Most people who voted for Barack Obama had no idea about any of his policies nor cared that he had no experience.

  48% voted for McCain and 38% didn't vote at all. Despite all the horrendous deeds and actions placed upon the head of the American people 48% still voted for McCain and 38% didn't vote-which, I think is a good thing for if they did I am sure which side they would have voted for.

  A student came to me yesterday during the inauguration and whispered in all honesty, "Obama is the Anti-Christ" and was visibly shaken and frightened. I wanted to laugh because that is a joke that one of my friends might whisper-but she was not joking. I then became saddened and frightened myself. Where does a 17 year old get his information but from an adult? The Anti Christ...A Yale Man?? The Anti Christ was foretold to come from the sea, right, or some such, and did that mean it was an island-Hawaii? The Devil incarnate was born on Hawaii, went to Yale, and wrote two books-I always expected more from the Devil, to be honest, not that Obama's accomplishments are not noteworthy and powerful they are just rather-mundane, for the Morning Star: no fire or brimstone, perhaps they will have to make the Oval Office out of asbestos.

  But the snide remarks aside. This child really believed it and we went down the reasoning she believed it and it became just that, belief. So we went into our, what has become my most common if not popular lesson, on belief. That our mind is the creator of our universe, our realities, and thus Belief is the reifier of all within our realm. If we believe that Jesus Christ was speaking in English then so be it: in our warped and strange world he was in the desert yelling out parables in an Anglo Saxon derived language. We must be so wary of what we believe, even more so than what we do not believe, we should look at what we believe as we would a poisonous snake inches from our face: with as much care and attention to detail.
  
  This is not to say that belief in the mythologic is not to be done. I think too much my students, at first, think that I am saying all must be material, no, I am not-in fact, with such attention to detail and skepticism one is able to unearth the real impetus for mythology: that it is to point to higher truths, to Truths that give form and reason to the material existence. This is much different than the Gut sort of belief-which requires no effort, no diligence, no prerequisites, nor humility-anyone can have an opinion in the Gut e.g. I can give my gut opinion on Hungarian etymology but I cannot, with all humility, give my learned opinion on it-because I have none. The Gut is not humble. Belief without pre-requisite, without study, without insight, without a long cultivation of diligence and humility-it is ignorance. I fight this every day. My beautiful students who are so capable, who have a potential capacity for genius and better than that, for a Humane and Moral life-have been succumbed, most of them, to the incessant barrage of belief-of gut belief, which leaves them, as I say often, like the Farrari in the garage; that they take their custom designed super engine and push it down the street.

  And this is dangerous to us. To US, to the USA-for it can only work with a gaggle of Willingly Informed Citizens-and that cannot be done through the television that has 40 second 'pieces' and then thirty second ads for toothpaste. This is insane-you cannot be a Christian when you haven't diligently studied the texts-it is not possible, it is like saying I am a PhD without going through the rigors of the process. I can have belief I am a Doctor, but no matter how much I believe, even to the point of believing, I am still just deluded, mad, insane, or all three. We are supposedly a largely vast melting pot of Abrahamatic believers and yet, I do not believe, one in ten knows more than a handful of the teachings of either the old or new Testament. When Paul said, "... and now there doth remain faith, hope, love -- these three; and the greatest of these is love." although, I am pretty sure, not in this language. And when you put these two together uninformed gut believers of the Christ and uninformed believers in the 'republic' you have a recipe ripe for disaster no matter who is in charge-and what happens, I ask, when we truly have a tyrant, or a passing of the torch from one to another-or worse yet, what if these Ignorant masses elect one of their own??? Well, what if they did it again???
  
  I have been called an elitist because I used a word like, 'antipodal', or 'malevolent'-and yet, it is strange that they do not think that George Bush who lives on a 1600 acre ranch is considered, "one of the boys"-with his Texas facade (his family is one of the effete north easterners from Conneticut of all places, yet, we think they were seeded and grown in the Texas panhandle) and his inherited riches. George Bush in his helicopter, limousine, and me with my bus pass and 17 yr old Honda that only my wife drives with the Baby. What happens when we equate literacy and a smattering of an education with the negative Elitism, and we equate posturing, character enhancement with proletarianism (which I probably shouldn't use lest I become labeled elite elitist or some such). What happens when we become serfs to our ignorance to such a degree we are able to see our ignorance as something to be proud of, to boast about, "I believe in God, Country, and Family-in that order" but they do not believe in understanding any of those three and what each entails in their own responsibility to it, no, that would be elitist. They just believe.
  
  We believe that welfare is bad and that corporate welfare is good
  we believe that we should be paying our farmers not to grow yet we don't believe that single mothers should spend more time with their children
  We believe America is great and all that it does is great no matter what it does and that any opposition to it is considered unpatriotic and, quite possibly, a damning offense-because Jesus loved America, yes, I said it in past tense-if he spoke English, then America could have been around, in its present form, before him too. Time is no object to the believer, nor is facts, nor is evidence, learning, and without any of these you cannot have morality of anything but belief in it, and thus, it doesn't need that either. They just need belief.
  
  This is not to the Paul Tillichs and the others who genuinely want to know the word of God, to dig deep and honestly in their quest-no, but I think, just like Mr. Tillich-they are, perhaps, all dead. Even the kind and decent human beings I have met that follow these teachings are not enough. For all great tyrannies, great fascist states, murderers of millions, was peopled by good and decent people-but woefully ignorant. They just wanted to believe; to believe they would be left alone, to believe that what they were told was right, to believe that those that spoke to them had their best intentions at hand. It was just belief.
  
  What happens when we inhabit this Demon Haunted World? Where it is all a function of our colon and small intenstines? That God is on some cold marble throne and looks, to most, like some version of Santa Claus, and Obama is the Anti Christ, that he is 'snotty' because he can speak in full sentences, that anyone or anything that challenges what you think, no, not think, what you believe, is seen as an enemy that must be vanquished, unlike what an educated Man, Woman thinks, that this is perhaps your greatest Friend and Teacher-that they, perhaps, bring the light to your ignorance. But when what we are to our very bones is Ignorant, that we love it as we would love the embrace of our very dearest lover, then what hope is there?
  
  Can one good man as a leader be able to lead those who have no pre-requisites of being a body to be lead? In a democracy, even an attempted one, it demands that the populace be rational, that it be able to sift through propaganda, that it have the ability to look at their belief skeptically and toss it away when it does not adhere to reason. There is a limit to reason but that limit is reached with reason-a very wise man once told me that in order to get to the conceptless ultimate reality one must use concepts to get there, much like how you must use diamonds to cut diamonds. This is not the same thing as the gut belief. The anti intellectual stance that believes that opposition to an education is the same thing as understanding , let alone achieving, conceptless reality.
  
  I am a teacher. I have been on for more than half of three decades. I have seen amazing children who embody the drive to be Human. But, the tide, as I have said before, has been inexorably toward the other side, to the depths of ignorance not as something to be ashamed of, to be worked to be eliminated, but a state to be 'proud of' and wallow in. Like so many pigs awaiting the bleeding and the hook.

   

  Be well
  G

  • 12:34 pm
  • 3 Comments