Disagreement Doesn't Make One a Hypocrite

 

Ignorance is bliss. We’ve all been told this.  Most of us have areas where it is true.  How difficult would life be if we had full knowledge of the day of our death or the death of a loved one? How would most of us deal with the knowledge that we had an incurable disease in our future? 

In such cases, ignorance really is bliss.  There’s another kind of ignorance, though.  Willful ignorance is a condition in which the truth is available and people choose not to seek out the facts because they are more comfortable with a lie.  This type of ignorance is unforgivable. 

Religion is the most common area in which the majority of worshippers choose not to question the tenets of faith that we have accepted all our lives. For most, it gives comfort. Generally, this type of blind ignorance is harmless as long as it deals with the afterlife.  You can sell spots in Heaven, but go to jail if you sell Earthly property you don’t own. 

Blind faith does become harmful if we believe everyone else is less than human if they differ from us.

Climate change is another good example of willful ignorance, of people believing what they are told by political ideologues.  It is getting warmer and there are changes in the weather because of the warming. I know, because the polar ice is melting and the glaciers are retreating in Greenland. These are facts. 

Personally, I see a pattern of warming and cooling that has happened over and over again.  I am not convinced that human beings have as much to do with it as some believe, nor do I know if it is necessarily a bad thing. The last big warming allowed Northern Europeans to raise enough crops to survive.

 Human beings are here because we have adapted to changes over and over again. 

That having been said, I believe what I believe by research and evaluation.  It is utter stupidity to look  around and try to deny what is happening as it is to swallow whole the arguments of the other side – especially if ideology is coloring your opinion.  If things can be done to fend off what is happening, they should be done, but not because of hysterical propaganda on either side. 

Maybe the best example of ideology over logic is the so-called issue of gun control. One side says all weapons should be rounded up and destroyed because they are evil.  That side ignores the Supreme Court ruling that says guns are a matter on which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled as an individual right under the 2^nd Amendment. 

The opposite side of the argument is that some gun rights advocates are trying to say that unlike all other rights, conditions can’t be placed on the on gun owners. This is nonsense because all other constitutional rights have exceptions. The 1^st, 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th all have exceptions and so does the 2^nd Amendment.  Public safety trumps them all. 

Society has a responsibility to keep lethal weapons away from the mentally ill and convicted felons. Once large source of such weapons can be stemmed by ending the unrecorded sales between individuals at organized gun shows. 

Of course, at present, the Bureau of Alcohol , Tobacco and Firearms isn’t allowed to force dealers to produce an and annual inventory – because of meddling by gun rights lobbyists. 

There’s a lot ignorance out there, but for most it is not blissful.