Sarah Nyhan

Just reposting something I wrote for a college course a long time ago.

I was very surprised to learn that non-practicing people often knew more about religions than the practitioners. Hitler is quoted as saying, “How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.”

I am unfortunately not surprised by the lack of knowledge people have about their own religions. A Bible verse in Hosea 4 quotes God as saying, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”

Isn’t it ironic that we are so ignorant in an age where maybe we have the most access to information in the entire history of humans?

Maybe the more comfort we attain, the less we seek knowledge and understanding? I think about the stories I’ve heard about persecuted Christians in China who tear pages out of one Bible and distribute a page or two to each person in the community who will then take the page home and copy or memorize it. Then the pages are rotated around the community until they are unusable. Or I think about the people who carry on the Bible Balloons project in order to reach the desperate Christians of North Korea.

When I read about weird cults reported in the news, as an outsider it seems totally ridiculous that people would participate in them. I think the leaders are experts at exploiting people’s blind spots and weaknesses. The Apostle Paul writes to Timothy, in 2 Timothy 3 as recorded in the Bible, about these wolves in sheep’s clothing: “For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

Whatever ideology one ascribes to, whether it be religious/political/etc, it seems that the wise person will dig in to ensure what they believe and why.