Learn More, Know Less

Throughout history, there have been amazing civilizations and revelations.  Today, we live in the Information Age, where virtually anything we want to know can be accessed with just a few mere touches of our fingertips to a machine.  Heck, even the advent of a machine is a miracle in itself.

Have we gotten too cocky?  I remember the lyrics to a theme song for a show in the 90s, “The Hogan Family”, which said “Life is such a sweet insanity. The more you learn, the less you know.”  I’m starting to believe – more than ever – that this is true.

Humankind has developed in ways that would make people born merely a century ago drop dead in disbelief.  The accomplishments we have made as a species is unbelievable.  But the only thing that astounds me more than our successes is our arrogance, not even our failures.  One point of our arrogance surpasses and surprises me than all other, however: Believing in God is rapidly becoming rapidly a signal of a lack of intelligence.  It seems we have bought into our own hype.

I’m sorry to burst our own intellectual bubble, but the more we learn, the less we know.  Humans on this planet have had civilizations without disease, meaning that even the common cold was a foreign concept. Making matters worse, these civilizations were thought to be “savages” and to live in “huts.” 

There have been multiple civilizations that interacted with each other, and fought wars; BLOODLESS wars. For those that don’t understand that concept, it means that two opposing nations disagreed, and settled their differences in a combat environment where nobody died. Oftentimes, no one was even hurt!

To be clear, many of these civilizations developed independently and during different eras of human existence.  They occupied all the hemispheres of the planet, and their ideals and achievements span thousands of years. As different as they all were, they all believed in some sort of divinity.  They might have worshipped their deity or deities differently, had different religious practices, or believed in different deities entirely, but they all had some sort of “faith.”  How foolish and arrogant of us to discount them!

No, they were not perfect civilizations, but were they really “worse” than ours?  We live in the prototype nation for freedom, where we judge and chastise other nations for not advancing the rights of women, unsanitary living conditions, etc., yet we still argue about birth control, give tax breaks to the rich, and lose countless souls to PREVENTABLE diseases and ailments, not to mention things like cancer and AIDS.  We fight wars that old people start and young people die in by the thousands, but we have the audacity to look at these other cultures as primitive. 

In the history of human evolution, atheism and agnosticism are relatively new concepts.  Actually, their widespread belief is arguably newer than the idea of fundamental human rights, which can be traced to a time hundreds – if not thousands – of years before the birth of Jesus. In this day and age – the era of technology, the mastery of sciences that would be deemed magical not too long ago – 80% of the world believes in some sort of religion.  That translates to roughly 5.5 BILLION people, again, in the INFORMATION AGE!  If we were to assume – falsely, I might add, since the percentage was most likely much higher – that this percentage has stayed constant throughout human history, it is arguable that the number of people that believe in some sort of deity living today equals the number of atheists and agnostics that have walked the earth EVER.  I admit that’s an exaggeration, but without doing a population check for the last 10,000 years, it is far from unfathomable.

Maybe you believe in a deity. Maybe you do not.  But the disdain those that do not have for those that do is beyond arrogant and idiotic.  Not all religions are the same, nor are all religions safe.  However, the fact that religion is as old as humankind itself should be enough to make an argument for actual possibility. 

We no longer fight bloodless wars.  We no longer have civilizations without disease.  We no longer have race-blind multinational civilizations.  In some circles, we no longer have a God.  We do have computers, cars, airplanes, chemistry, physics, biology, inequality, famine, socioeconomic classism, racism, and hate.  Some of these things – good and bad – have existed for a long time. Some of them have not.  It truly does seem like the more we learn, the less we know.