Watching an interview of Richard Dawkins last night, he said [the title of this post] after making an interesting point about the word IGNORANT which stuck out to me.
Dawkins recounted a New York Times article in which he wrote that Anybody who doesn’t believe in evolution is either ignorant, stupid, or insane. Then, he followed up by saying that the word “ignorant” is not a disparaging word. It is simply a word. An adjective.
It simply means:
Lacking knowledge or awareness in general.
Lacking knowledge or awareness in general.
Removing the emotion from it makes it much easier to stomach, and I know you know how much emotion has been put into “ignorant” and many other words… They’re given connotations in popular usage, their meanings are watered down or beefed up, and we use quite a few words in ignorance, unaware of their true meanings (literally, compassion, truth… just to name a few).
We are ALL ignorant to something, rather, many things.
In an arms-length radius around me at this very moment, I can see I’m ignorant to…
- What it feels like to be covered in fur, like the dog with her head in my lap.
- What my lap feels like to lie in.
- The process of growing coffee beans.
- How to make the metal in the frame of the recliner.
- How to make the recliner’s “feet” pop out.
- Where one even obtains a loom to make cloth, like the blanket on my leg, the Ninja Turtlss sweatshirt on my torso, the tapestry hanging on the wall…
- The phone I’m using to write this is full of stuff…
See where I’m going with this?
I could easily find out answers to those things (other than what it’s like to be a dog or to experience my own body), if I cared to.
But there are TONS of things we all walk around completely void of knowledge about.
That includes the experience of being someone else. (Jelaine would have made my list, but she was in the shower)
How can we make blanket statements about how people should live, or what they should think and believe? How can what works for you work for me, or vice versa?
So, with that being said, let’s find out what DOES apply to us all, what common ground we have as humans, work from there to make things better, & respect each other’s autonomy about 184% more, kthnxbai.