The Religion of Ignorance

Journal Aggrazel's Journal: The Religion of Ignorance 4

Journal by Aggrazel on Friday September 10, 2004 @10:21AM

Yesterday, I had to bring my Beetle to the shop. It's has a slight problem where the windows don't "drop" properly sometimes when you open the doors, it's a convertible so it's supposed to lower the windows about an inch when you open the door so it can go under the roof properly. This makes for a tighter seal when the top is up.

While I was in the wait area, they had Fox News playing on one of the televisions. I typically don't watch any news channels, I don't watch much TV at all for that matter, so I have no idea if what I saw was typical.

They were discussing the recent crash of the Genesis probe, and they were putting "viewer e-mail" up on the screen. Several of the e-mails ran along the same disturbing trend. Now I'm going to paraphrase here as I do not remember the exact quote, but the message was this:

"I don't want NASA spending $270 million to tell me the origins of the universe, when all I have to do is look in the book of Genesis."

or ...

"Why is NASA bothering with this? Everyone knows God created the universe in 6 days."

This was absolutely one of the most ignorant statements I had ever read. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people being religious, in fact at one time I was a Christian myself. However even in my most "faithful" of days, I never would have made such an asinine statement. Its tantamount to saying, "Lets not study anything that the Bible already has defined."

Ok, so for you Christians out there who think that we shouldn't study the creation of the universe, let me ask you a question: How did God create the sun? I know the Bible says that He went, "Let there be light" and there it was. But when He spoke those words, what happened? Did it suddenly appear where there was no star? Or was there a process involved, a starting point that grew (however rapidly you want to believe) that created the Sun and the Stars, etc.

Unless you bury your head in ignorance, you know that everything has a process. The earth is built from layers, and even if you are one of the sort that believe in "Apparent Age" (which is, in my opinion, a doctrine of ignorance in and of itself) you have to believe that there was a process involved, and in studying that process, knowledge could be gained.

I guess I'm saying, I don't see any point in wanting to remain ignorant about the world around us. Even if you believe that God created it, what harm is there in understanding? What's the point of studying anything? Wouldn't you think that by studying God's creation, it would bring you closer to Him? I could be off, as I say, I'm not a Christian anymore, so maybe I'm missing the point.

NASA can continue to spend billions of dollars to research the universe as far as I'm concerned. For every spectacular failure that was Genesis, there are other missions that are resounding successes. And even though Genesis crashed, do you not think that some of that $270 million was spent on engineering that will be applicable to other missions, perhaps other things in the private sector? You never know, one day you may owe your life to something that borne from NASA's research.

I wonder if any of those people who wrote those e-mails to a News channel brodcast via satellite to the world about how the space program is a big waste of money saw even a bit of the irony in that message.

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