Ignorance

I believe that ignorance is the "root of all evil" in our world. In the past 200 years, our technological progress has been incredible. Sadly, most people are as ignorant as people living thousands of years ago.

Right now, we are like chimps with nuclear weapons, our technological development is way too advanced for our mental development, that's why we face the threat of destroying ourselves. It's like giving a real loaded gun to a child and expecting everything to be fine. That's the stage we are in, really. We are not civilized yet.

Behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner made an experiment with pigeons, where he set the dispenser to release food at a certain time interval. If a pigeon did something while the dispenser released the food, it associated the action with the reward. So, one pigeon was making turns in his cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviours, all done in the hope of receiving food from the dispenser. It didn't matter how many times they performed an action without receiving anything. When the dispenser finally released the food, they associated their action with the reward. This is superstition and humans have it too.

Knowledge and understanding are powerful weapons against superstition and other absurd beliefs. If people would understand more about the world, the Universe, about life, they would not believe the absurdities of religion, of astrology, of homeopathy and all other superstitions.

Most people still believe in gods, in heaven and hell, in angels and demons. I find that silly but I'm not really against religion, I'm against ignorance. If religion would not exist, people would find other absurd things to fill their ignorance hole.

I call God "the god of ignorance", because what we can't understand we explain through him. Of course, God explains nothing, it just gives an illusion of explanation. Supernatural answers (like "God did it") are just an elegant way of saying "I have no idea".

As Voltaire put it "Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities".