iwasthinking: Oh my

12/04/2007

Oh my

For half a thousand reasons I don't watch much TV. Today I saw one of those reasons. While i know that i have a greater knowledge of history than most people, there are somethings that i still find dismaying in their shedding light on how badly most people fail to learn. I don't ask that anyone know the order that battles took place in during the Civil War. I don't ask anyone to know how many 'German' principalities there were ten years after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. I certainly don't ask people to be able to translate dates from the Judaic calender to the traditional Chinese one then into the modern one American and most of the world uses. Most of those things are trivial, or just plane useless.

What I do ask for isn't even a firm grasp of history. Just a basic grasp of logic. The statement of the person in question that spurred this was "I don't think anything predates Jesus Christ." Let's examine some of the things wrong with this statement. Even leaving things written into the bible aside, let's see what things there were in the world at the time we are told Christ was born.

There was clothing.
There were cities.
There were domestic animals.
There was written language.
There was the art and science of architecture, as supported by the claim that Jesus was born in a barn.
There was 'the sacrament of marriage'.
Mary.

Now, some of you might have come to the conclusion that this is one Hollywood's teen or twenty somethings that is a victim of the recent breakdown of the American education system. This person is forty years old. Now given their age, and their religious background I am amazed that a person who normally manages to sound intelligent could actually state this. I know that the schools in the North East were still teaching the meaning of "A.D.", and "B.C." after the time this person would have left school. I can't say for sure that the they would have been taught this in school. I can say, that even with out the evidence I've noted that this proves our education system with the whole hearted cooperation of the media and government has succeeded in its primary goal of suppressing any independent thinking, the suppression of active use of logic and reason, and the crushing of any ability to question authority or how things happen independently. In this persons case, the additional burdens of the two religious sects they have followed probably make it nearly impossible for them not to have made this statement under the right circumstances.

Labels: dumb celebrites, education, media, religion, society, the powers that shouldn't be