  
If You Think Education Is Expensive, TRY Ignorance.
No, ignorance isn't bliss. Who ever sold you on that idea? Ignorance means you
haven't been informed. Webster says this about ignorance.
It's a lack of knowledge or
unawareness. Now, someone can be ignorant in a certain field or area. That might be acceptable in some cases. After all, man doesn't know it all. But what if a person is ignorant and
chooses to ignore it?
What if opportunity
presents itself and you choose to ignore it? What if all you had to do was study the books in your profession, craft or skill and you chose to ignore that opportunity?
Could you expect
to get the raises and promotions? I don't think so.
God came up the
word ignorant and here are a few admonitions from Ancient Script concerning it.
"For I would not have
you to be ignorant brethren…"
"But beloved, be not ignorant…"
"But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant…"
In other words,
if you choose ignorance you have no right to complain about the consequence of such a refusal.
Did you know that
the words ignorant and ignorance appear 35 times in the
Bible? Yet we read the Bible so little let alone study it. "Study to show your self approved" said one writer.
What does studying do
for you? Everything! It makes you knowledgeable. You're now sophisticated and you can talk about almost anything to
almost anybody.
Ignorance:
And he keeps on writing.
"Who cares if my blood pressure is too high?" That kind of ignorance
could kill you.
"Cholesterol? What's that? Mines probably okay." You'll probably
die early.
"It was only a little cough. It will go away." Will it?
In America we're
supposed to know and it isn't because there is a shortage of information. We have all the info we need at the tips of our fingers called the Internet.
Someone says,
"Ah, what you don't know won't hurt you." No, what you don't know WILL hurt you. As a matter of fact it could kill you. What you DO know could save your life.
Some diseases are running
rampant because we never thought it mattered. We didn't stop to check it out before we made the decision to go ahead and do it. Who cares? It was only once.
Here are a few more areas where ignorance got us into trouble.
Why do they get us into
trouble? Because we won't take the time to find out what the contents of these documents say.
It's the same way with
books we buy. Read a chapter or two and then toss it aside never to peer into its contents again. Most of the time
it is because we're too lazy and we think it won't make a difference. Yet the contents could've changed our lives.
Debt is another area
in which most people are ignorant. They haven't a clue as to how much debt they owe. And
they keep paying and paying and paying, never making any headway.
People who are dieting
are taking products, the contents of which, they know nothing about. It could kill them; yet, they continue to take the product.
From the spiritual aspect
of it the writer of Ancient Script said that we weren't suppose to be ignorant. Did he know
something that those to whom he was speaking didn't know? Obviously so. What was it?
Was it perhaps
he had been down the road of ignorance and knew first hand what would happen if a person
remained ignorant of certain matters? Probably so.
He seemed to speak with
an authority on the matter of ignorance so he probably had some experiences with
it. And haven't we all had some experiences with ignorance?
Far too many people
want to be successful without studying success. You can't be successful and ignorant at the same time. Ignorant people don't
grow.
Don't be ignorant!
Know what you're doing every minute of the day. It can only help you reach your God-given destination.
I Wish You Great Success,
Dr. Wm. G. Seavey
Ignorance Is No Crime by Richard Dawkins
"It's absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or
wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."
I first wrote that in a book
review in the New York Times in 1989 & it has been much quoted against me ever since, as evidence of my arrogance and intolerance. Of course it sounds arrogant, but undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance. Examine the statement carefully and it turns out to be moderate, almost self-evidently true.
By far the largest of the
4 categories is "ignorant," and ignorance is no crime
(nor is it bliss, I forget who it was said, "If ignorance is
bliss, how come there's so much misery about?").
Anybody who thinks Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer has to be ignorant, stupid, or insane (probably ignorant) and you wouldn't think me arrogant for saying so. It's not intolerant to remark that flat-earthers are ignorant, stupid, or
(probably) insane. It's just true.
The difference is that not
many people think Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer, or that the Earth is flat, so it isn't worth calling attention to their ignorance. But, if polls are to be believed, 100 million U.S. citizens believe that humans and dinosaurs were created within the same week as each other, less than ten thousand years ago.
This is more serious. People
like this have the vote and we have George W. Bush (with a little help from his friends
in the Supreme Court) to prove it. They dominate school boards in some states.
Their views flatly contradict
the great corpus of the sciences, not just biology but physics, geology, astronomy and many others. It's, of course, entirely
legitimate to question conventional wisdom in fields that you've bothered to mug up first.
That's what Einstein did and
Galileo and Darwin. But our hundred million are another matter. They're contradicting, influentially and powerfully, vast fields of learning in which their own knowledge and reading is indistinguishable from zero.
My "arrogant and intolerant" statement turns out to be nothing but simple truth.
Not only is ignorance
no crime, it's also, fortunately, remediable. In the same Times review, I went on to recount my experiences
of going on radio phone-in talk shows around the United States.
Opinion polls had led me to
expect hostile cross-examination from creationist zealots. I encountered little of that kind. I got creationist opinions in plenty, but these were founded on honest ignorance, as was freely confessed.
When I politely and patiently explained what Darwinism actually is, they listened not only with equal politeness, but with interest and even enthusiasm.
"Gee, that's real neat,
I never heard that before! Wow!" These people were not stupid (or insane, or wicked).
They didn't believe in evolution, but this was because nobody had ever told them what evolution is.
And because plenty of people
had told them (wrongly, according to educated theologians) that evolution
is against their cherished religion.
I think it was my colleague John Endler, author of Natural Selection in the Wild, a fine compendium of field
evidence on that important subject, who told me the following story. I may have got the details wrong, but it was approximately
as follows.
He was on an internal flight
within the United States and his neighbor casually asked him what he did for a living. Endler replied he was a professor of
biology, doing research on wild guppy populations in Trinidad.
The man became increasingly interested,
so, without ever mentioning Darwin, natural selection, or evolution, Endler explained more about his research. The man was
greatly taken with the brilliant simplicity of the theory underlying the experiments and he asked Endler the name of this
theory and where it came from.
Only then did Dr. Endler reveal his
hand. "It's called Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection!" The man's whole demeanor instantly changed.
He became defensive, asserted abruptly that he didn't believe in that theory and terminated the conversation.
Ignorant certainly,
stupid perhaps, but not wicked. I originally listed "wicked" as one of my possibilities, only for completeness. I've never
been sure whether there truly are intelligent, knowledgeable and sane people who feign disbelief in evolution for ulterior
motives.
Perhaps a political candidate
needs some such dissimulation in order to get elected in certain states. If so, it's sad but possibly not much more reprehensible than the proverbial kissing of babies. Not deeply wicked.
There are certainly many creationists
who tell lies for propaganda purposes, wantonly and knowingly misquoting biologists, from Darwin on down. Such dishonesty is documented on several Web sites and by the Australian geologist Ian Plimer in his book Telling Lies for God.
Coincidentally, the worst
occasion when I have been misrepresented in this way involved an Australian creationist organization, which fraudulently mis-cut
the tape of an interview of me. The story, which is quite amusing though it irritated me at the time, is told in the Australian Skeptic by Barry Williams, editor of that admirable magazine (http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/news/file007.html).
But such minor examples of wickedness
can be excused on the grounds that ignorance and stupidity trump wickedness.
Are there, then, any examples of anti-evolution poseurs who aren't ignorant, stupid, or
insane and who might be genuine candidates for the wicked category?
David Berlinski, who is certainly
not ignorant, stupid, or insane, denies that he is a creationist, but claims strong scientific arguments against evolution (which
disappointingly turn out to be the same old creationist arguments).
As guests of a prominent rabbi,
he and I once shared a platform in Oxford, together with the great John Maynard Smith and others. Maynard Smith spoke after
Berlinski and not surprisingly, he soon had the audience roaring with laughter as he lampooned Berlinski's bad arguments.
But what amused me was Berlinski's
tactic for dealing with this mocking laughter. He sprang to his feet, held up a reproachful open palm towards the audience
and said (approximately of course, I can't remember the exact words):
"No, no! Don't laugh. Let
Maynard Smith have his say! It's only fair!" Happily, the Oxford audience saw through this tactic of pretending to think the audience was laughing at Maynard Smith rather than with him. And the rabbi, himself a devout creationist, afterwards
told me he had been shocked at Berlinski's duplicity.
I don't withdraw a word
of my initial statement. But I do now think it may have been incomplete. There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under "insane" but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed.
Sincere people who aren't
ignorant, not stupid and not wicked can be cruelly torn, almost in two, between the massive
evidence of science on the one hand and their understanding of what their holy book tells them on the other.
I think this is one of the truly bad things religion can do to a human mind. There is wickedness here,
but it's the wickedness of the institution and what it does to a believing victim, not wickedness on the part of the victim himself.
The clearest example
I know is poignant, even sad and I shall do it justice in a later article.
Programs that provide no alternative leave children unprepared, ignorant By Matt Rigney
For years, conservatives have
been lauding abstinence-only education programs as a way to lower teens' sexual activity, lower the abortion rate, lower the
number of cases of STD's and raise the moral standard of the nation's teens.
They say that abstinence is
the only way to improve teens' lives. The truth is, abstinence-only education isn't the most effective way to keep teens safe.
The Netherlands has the lowest abortion rate in the world with between 5 &
7 women out of 1,000 having abortions each year. It also boasts one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates in the world:
- Less than 1% of 15 to 17 year-old females gets pregnant every
year, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis and the National Library of Medicine.
In the United States, 34%
of women become pregnant before the age of 20 and 8 in 10 of these pregnancies are unintended, according to teenpregnancy.org.
The Dutch government achieves this unparalleled success through open communication with teens about sex and a program that educates, rather than threatens.
Teens are going
to find a way to have sex if they want to. In some cases, explicitly telling teens to abstain from sex may make them
want to rebel. Although President George W. Bush and his political cronies claim that his abstinence-only education program
is responsible for a decrease in the teen birth rate, this number has been declining since 1991 - 10 years before Bush took
office.
This type of education program threatens teens with stories of pregnancy
and STD's, scaring them into thinking that abstinence is the only way to avoid these problems.
Obviously, abstinence is the
best way to avoid pregnancy and STD's, but teens must be taught the alternatives. Not every American shares the same moral
and religious beliefs as the president.
European programs, especially in The Netherlands, stress the importance
of making the right personal decisions, not the importance of abiding by others' decisions. Dutch sexual education programs
establish an open line of communication.
Almost all Dutch secondary schools
and about 50% of primary schools address sexuality and contraception, rather than abstinence only, according to the National
Library of Medicine.
Dutch children are exposed
to sexuality without the taboo that the United States places on it, making them easier pupils to teach.
This open-communication policy encourages parents to talk with their teenage children about sex, an important facet of the European-style sexual education programs.
According to teenpregnancy.org, 70% of teens said they were willing to listen to things their parents thought they were not ready to hear and more than 70% of teens said that a lack of communication between a girl and her parents was a reason she may become pregnant.
As a result
of the greater communication between parents and teens, European teenagers begin having sex at around 17 years old, two years after the average American
teen starts.
This is an important statistic, because children who have sex at a younger age are more likely to be victims of rape:
- 40%
of girls who had sex at age 13 or 14 said it was involuntary,
according
to teenpregnancy.org.
And logic dictates that the sooner a person starts having sex, the more likely they are to become
pregnant or contract an STD.
The Dutch and European sexual education programs also
stress the importance of contraceptive use. These programs discuss the use of, the pros and cons and the risks involved with
each type of contraception. They also give students access to contraceptives, making a responsible decision more likely.
Conservatives are pulling the wool over their own eyes, thinking they will be able to stop teens from having sex. No one can stop teens from having sex, so why take away their access to affordable or free
contraception?
If sexual education programs teach abstinence as the only way to
prevent pregnancy and STD's, teens who choose to have sex will be ignorant of the risk they
are taking.
These teens will also be ill-equipped to practice safe sex when they choose to do so.
Conservative efforts to push abstinence education
are misinformed. If government officials would look at the results that other countries are getting out of a total sexual
education package and encourage American schools to adopt such programs, teenage sexuality problems would severely decline.
Keeping teens ignorant (and pregnant)
By Richard Cohen
BEFORE I tell you what Rep.
Lois Capps, D-Calif., did, I want to tell you something about her. She's the daughter of a Lutheran minister. She has a degree
in religion and her late husband graduated from divinity school.
She was head nurse at Yale-New
Haven Hospital and director of the Santa Barbara school system's teenage pregnancy and parenting program.
Last month, she offered an
amendment to the government's sexual abstinence program, asking only that it be medically and scientifically accurate. She
lost, 31-19.
Soon after, the measure providing
more money for President Bush's cherished abstinence-only program sailed out of the House Energy & Commerce Committee,
heading to the floor where it will surely pass.
The provision to keep America's teenagers
as ignorant as possible about sex - even, as Capps knows, to teach them what's false - is
embedded in a whale of a bill that contains so much for so many that, should it fail, it could only mean that our cherished political system has collapsed and reason has triumphed.
The abstinence-only provision
is a measure so illogical that just to contemplate it raises the sound fear that you'll lose your mind. It offers the states $50 million a year to teach abstinence as the only way to deal with sex.
That's it. Nothing about sex education. Nothing about how to avoid pregnancy, venereal disease or HIV-AIDS.
Condoms may be mentioned,
but only their failure rates. The fact that they most often are effective must not be mentioned. In effect, teachers must lie.
Now consider the American teenager.
More than half aged 15-19 have had sex. For 18-year-olds, the figure is 70%. More than 750,000 teenagers a year become pregnant.
Compared with teenagers in, say, sexually rambunctious Sweden or France, those in America are a sorry lot.
They have the highest rate of adolescent
childbearing (22% for the United States; 4% for Sweden) and the
highest abortion rate. The figures speak for themselves: When it comes to sex, our kids don't know what they're doing.
The same can be said
for our political leaders. It's not, mind you, that there is anything wrong with abstinence, which is, as our tautology-addicted
president tells us, 100% effective. Rather, it's that abstinence only works when it works.
When it doesn't - when the
well-intentioned kid falls off the wagon - he or she ought to know what to do. The consequences can be lethal - HIV-AIDS, for instance.
The abstinence-only program didn't,
as you may think, spring from the brow of George W. Bush. It has been around since 1996, when some legislators with dirty minds slipped it
into the welfare reform bill.
But both in concept and as legislation
it has been embraced by Bush, who mentions it frequently and with enthusiasm. "It works every time,'' he said recently. So does death.
In a sense, abstinence-only
is the intellectual heart of Bushism. It's based solely on faith, on conviction - on what ought to be and not on what is.
The program persists despite
no evidence that it works and in the face of some evidence that it doesn't. It's a muddled aspiration, coupled with such sanctimonious
nonsense about chastity until marriage (average marriage age: 27 for men, 26 for women)
that it simply can't be taken seriously.
But even if abstinence was the way
to go, what could be wrong with teaching sex education as well -- just in case? Where else, in what other area,
do we insist on ignorance and maintain that knowledge is wrong?
This isn't our way. This is
a totalitarian concept. It amounts, truly, to abuse of power.
The power and authority of the teacher rests on his or her greater knowledge. What do you call it, then, when information that
could be necessary for a full and happy life is withheld? What do you call it when through avoidable ignorance and
its handmaiden, shame, a teenager gets pregnant, has an abortion or has a child?
What can you call it when,
for lack of knowledge, a child gets AIDS and dies? Is this what George Bush wants? I hope not. But this is what he is going to get.
The United States is far and away
the most religiously observant of all Western nations. Yet it has teenage pregnancy rates that also lead the Western world. Our kids are not immoral or
irreligious. They're too often woefully ignorant - ashamed of their sexuality, hiding it and its consequences from everyone, not even knowing that a condom can save their lives.
Lois Capps - mother and nurse
- asked, in essence, only for the government to tell kids the truth.
It abstained.
Richard Cohen is a Washington Post columnist.
|
 |
|
A
person can be ignorant (not knowing some fact or idea)
without being stupid (incapable of learning because of a basic mental deficiency). And those who say, “That’s an ignorant
idea” when they mean “stupid idea” are expressing their own ignorance.
Why the ignorant are blissful
Inept individuals ooze confidence, study finds
by Erica Goode, New York Times
There are many incompetent
people in the world. Dr. David Dunning is haunted by the fear he might be one of them.
Dunning, a professor of psychology
at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people don't know they're incompetent.
On the contrary. People who
do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted w/a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities - more confident in fact, than people who do things well.
"I began to think that there
were probably lots of things that I was bad at & I didn't know it," Dunning said.
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
The incompetent, therefore,
suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology.
"Not only do they reach erroneous
conclusions & make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it," wrote Kruger,
now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois & Dunning.
The deficiency in "self-monitoring
skills," the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor -impaired to persist in telling jokes that aren't funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump
into the market & repeatedly lose out & the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the
fine points of campaign strategy.
Some college students, Dunning
said, evince a similar blindness: after doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining why the answers
he suggests for the test questions are wrong.
In a series of studies, Kruger
& Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of
logic, English grammar & humor were also the most likely to "grossly overestimate" how well they had performed.
In all three tests, subjects'
ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater
distortions in their self-estimates.
Asked to evaluate their performance
on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed they had scored in
the 62nd percentile & deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.
Similarly, subjects who scored
at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to "identify grammatically
correct standard English," & estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.
On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects'
ratings were matched against those of an "expert" panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also
more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill.
But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were less conclusive.
Unlike their unskilled counterparts,
the most able subjects in the study, Kruger & Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their own competence. The researchers
attributes this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others are doing, highly competent subjects assumed
that others were performing as well as they were - a phenomenon psychologists term the "false consensus effect."
When high scoring subjects
were asked to "grade" the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance.
In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others;
some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.
"Incompetent individuals were
less able to recognize competence in others," the researchers concluded.
In some cases, Dunning pointed
out, an awareness of one's own incompetence is inevitable: "In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the woods, you know you're incompetent,"
he said.
But in other situations, feedback
is absent, or at least more ambiguous.
All of which inspired in Dunning
& his co-author, in presenting their research to the public, a certain degree of nervousness.
"This article may contain faulty
logic, methodological errors or poor communication," they cautioned in their journal report. "Let us assure our readers
that to the extent this article is imperfect, it's not a sin we have committed knowingly."
Ignorance Is Bliss
by Laura Cade (aka Moondragon) Copyright © 2007 Spiritual-Short-Stories.com
Do they understand that I'm about to die?? This thought hovered in the space around her as she looked wearily around the hospital room. Relatives and friends milled about, seemingly
oblivious to their dying loved one. They chatted and laughed, enjoying one another's company.
Occasionally someone would
come over to her and try to make small talk (always about something other than what was
about to happen) but it typically didn't last long for their weariness about the situation would soon get
the best of them. Once in awhile she noticed someone staring at her as if she were a specimen in a lab, or just simply someone
to be pitied. Her heart was breaking in her chest, but it was impossible to connect with anyone on that level.
The closest she came was with her sister-in-law when
she first realized that she was dying. She had let her rest her head on her chest while simply holding her lovingly and knowingly. Her sister-in-law had lost her husband a few years prior so she was well versed in comforting the sick. She lost all sense of control in those moments as she gratefully let out a lot of the homesickness and fear that was already starting to plague her.
How she got to this place she did not
know. She was barely an adult, but she felt like an old woman. The life force was draining out of her at a fairly rapid rate,
so it was all she could do to try to hold onto the last moments. Even with everyone's awkwardness about the inevitable, she was still immensely grateful for their presence. She was even moved to tears when her electrician paid a visit. She hardly knew the man, but that didn't
matter.
When you're losing all you've ever known, you are grateful for even the tiniest gestures of compassion. Her baby, her child, she could barely stand to see him, let alone hold him in her arms. It felt as if someone was ripping
her heart right out of her chest in those moments. It was suffocatingly painful, but she knew that she would regret it forever if she did not spend as much of her last moments with him as she could.
But
when he looked up into her eyes and gave her a sweet little smile she could not, would not, control the tears pouring down her cheeks, her sobs drowning out everything around her. He did not understand what was going on; he was much too young. Oh, the bliss of ignorance; how she missed it
so.
Knowing that all these beautiful people would be left behind was something she
never really thought about until now. Funny how easy it is to ignore the inevitable until it hits you in the chest, going about your day like you have a million to spare, ignoring everyone and everything around you that doesn't add to your sense of immortality.
She
couldn't do that any longer nor was she going to try to pretend to do so. She sat there in her blank hospital bed with
all the blank faces peering at their idea of her, wondering if the next wave of pain that went through her would be her last.
She sat there in a mixture of death and life, one foot in one world, one foot in the other while she pondered whether or not
it was worth it to try to explain to all of them what she knew to be true about life and death and everything in between.
Were they ready?
Would they digest the words or would
they simply go through one ear and out the other?
Looking around at the earnest
group, she knew they would have their day to ponder these questions, too. Leave them be, she decided, let the ignorant be blissful while they still can.
source site: click here please!
|
|
|
|
|
February 21, 2004
Ignorant Generation
My friend, Billy, invited
my husband and me over for grilled steaks and beer. Joining us were his parents, his girlfriend and a few of our other friends.
Ages 19 - 48 were represented and when we reached politics as a conversation topic, I learned just how ignorant my generation really is.
Billy's dad quickly stated,
"Let me guess, I bet you're a democrat, like everyone else your age." I was stunned for two reasons. First, I never knew most
people my age were left-wingers and second, this man didn't even take the time to ask my opinions or views before making his foot-in-mouth assumption.
I quickly corrected him by stating,
"No, I'm not a democrat, thank you. My views are definitely more right-wing...I consider myself to be an independent conservative,
more than anything." His jaw dropped.
At that point, Billy's girlfriend
proudly announced she was a democrat and then abruptly changed the subject. And pretty soon, it was just Billy's dad and me...debating
over issues.
No one else in my age group
bothered to discuss anything...not because they weren't interested, but because they didn't have a clue. In fact, when I mentioned
my loathing of Kerry, someone asked if Kerry was a girl I knew from high school.
How ignorant
can you be?! Granted, I'm not a political fountain of knowledge, nor do I pretend to be, but come on!! At least I know
of John Kerry and why I wouldn't vote for him even if I was tied up with a gun to my head.
At least I surround myself
with educated characters who can assist me in my quest for political knowledge, or at the very least, allow me to develop my own
opinions, based on their observations.
In fact, I have a good friend
that brings forth feeling honest, feelings of honesty, level-headed opinions, supported by various sources. Luckily, I've found kinfolk
with shared opinions, however, none of them are of my generation.
My generation is ignorant and apathetic towards our government and political future. THIS IS A HUGE, RED FLAG!! My cousin is a 20 year-old political science major
with extremely liberal opinions, but at least he HAS opinions.
He's brilliant and wise beyond his years, which is refreshing, but rare. My generation seems so indecisive about issues of importance, quick to develop opinions with little support or knowledge and oblivious to the consequences of their actions.
I suppose this is the reason
that the majority of my close friends are decades older than me and the reason that I feel trapped being a 20-something with middle-aged thinking. Regardless, as much as I might be a part of this generation, I'm equally apart of them.
Teacher calls student "ignorant"
for believing in Creation!
Our Web site has had a tremendous
impact on visitors since it first appeared on the Internet 5 years ago. We are currently averaging over 7,000 visitors a day–sometimes
over 8,000!
A high school senior e-mailed us
recently to let us know how much our Web site has meant to him, especially in light of recent opposition from a teacher.
We trust you'll rejoice with us as you read about his tenacity and obvious commitment to our Creator and His Word.
Dear AiG:
My name is Jacob and I live
in Ashland, Kentucky. As a high school senior, I am faced with many challenges regarding my faith and the Creator.
All through high
school, evolutionist doctrines have been crammed down my throat and my belief in the Lord Jesus Christ has been ridiculed without respite.
The pinnacle
of these attacks occurred about a week ago, when I was discussing the science of special creation with one of my friends.
A passing educator overheard the conversation and told me that I was "ignorant" and that
evolution was an undisputed fact. She told me that she felt sorry for science teachers who have
to cope with students like me.
It wasn’t
until this experience befell me that I realized how widespread the "fact" of evolution has become. To believe in the creation of the universe in an educational setting is social suicide. I often wonder why it has to be this way and
why so few are able to embrace the truth.
As I surfed the Web tonight,
I came across your Web page and a great burden was lifted off my back. The articles and resources have been such a blessing to my discouraged heart. It feels marvelous to know that there are others out there who bear the same plight as myself and must face the "cold light of science" attitude embraced by the instructional population.
I hope that one day even leading evolutionists will have their eyes opened to the faultiness of the theory and be given salvation
from the Lord. Criticizing these people is necessary, but we must all realize that apart from the grace of God, we would be just like them.
It's for this reason that
I will continue to pray for my teachers and peers. I'm interested in helping in anyway that I can. It would be a great honor, especially for an issue of such importance. I appreciate your efforts.
Yours in Christ,
Jacob
Ashland, KY
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
