What things causes stupidity,ignorance?

[Phish]

Oh damn. And here I thought this was going to be an actual thread on the psychology of stupidity. D'oh!



For what it's worth, I don't cotton to these notions of the dualistic mind, but am too lazy to organize my thoughts and type a response.

At an interfaith discussion group I belong to, one of the discussions was around the meaning of the story of the fall. One of our members is a very fundamentalist Christian who insisted on spinning the story as a prefigurement of Christ combined with an existential drama. In his view, in the garden, mankind knew God in the immediate sense; there was no separation between them and God, so they lived 24/7 with the knowledge of God and his love. The story of the fall in his view is a metaphor for Adam and Eve choosing to "know the world" — to become acquainted with the world of the senses and concerns of reality. This move separated them from God, so that they could no longer "know Him" in the immediate knowing Him as knowing oneself way that they had enjoyed in paradise, and they essentially "left the Garden" by choosing to embrace the world as such.

I don't put much stock in it, but I had a different interpretation. To me, it seems that God set mankind up to fail in the garden, but that was the whole point. Prior to the fall, everything was perfect, they wanted not, and nothing they did was wrong. However, in this state, they would never experience failure, and never experience loss. One cannot recognize that one is free until one has seen that one's actions have consequences; you can't strive and experience the basic of choice, if you've no knowledge that you can fail, or that you can lose something. Adam and Eve would not truly touch their essential freedom, God's greatest gift to them, until they experienced failure and loss as a result of the choices they had made. The fall in the garden was God's plan to introduce them to their essential freedom, by letting them fail. In a sense, it was the existential version of pushing them out of the nest. So the fall wasn't intended as a punishment, the fall was God's way of teaching mankind of its essential freedom. The fall was God teaching man to fly.

Now I don't believe in the fall, of course, so my interpretation was just an excuse to go outside and stretch my neurons. However, the potential for radically divergent interpretations suggests that there are many interpretations which go undiscussed; and that the traditional polemics that is often used by secularists in discussing the fall is to take on the classical theological interpretations of the fall lock-stock-and-barrel, and only a select variety of them. When you get locked into one particular way of viewing the story, whether you're for or against it, it blinds you.

who said that we can only disguss this topic lets all discuss what causes idiotism as well

P.S: since when is fr0d0 an christian wasn't he a musli 5 months ago?