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Ignorance can exist on both sides of any issue. Propaganda is the tool of ignorance. They cumulatively

become a two edged sword striking at whatever gets in their way. Reason and "any" claims to deeper

spiritual (or otherwise) values are the first victims. In order to attain any movement towards peace or

reconciliation, the sword must be abandoned.

It has been argued that the best defense is a strong and aggressive offence. I believe that comes fromthe "George W. Bush Strategy for Peace in Our Times". Defensive posturing is one thing, but often

becomes confused by our own sub-conscious desires and will to "control". That may first be rationalized

as the "freedom" to control "my" own destiny, then collectively "our" destinies. Ultimately it manifests

not as "control of personal destiny" but domination of any who are assumed to interfere with our

perceived destiny. And this has nothing to do with religion or the lack of it. It is individual and collective

human nature and is fueled by ignorance. And ignorance is not the sole possession of the religious.

"Religion" is only a tool or excuse of the ignorant, as is secular humanist sectarianism by the equally

ignorant.

Fear is a product of ignorance. Not the ignorance of facts and figures and histories, but the ignorance of

whom or what we are as the human being. Our understanding of knowledge begins with our

comprehension of what we believe of ourselves as a people. My family, my siblings, my extended

family, my tribe, our immediate social structures and values and networks , our collective mythologies

and beliefs, our state, our regional geography, our national identity, these all contribute to what it is

we believe we know is the absolute nature of reality and the way humanity is intended to be

realized and understood.

We send our kids off to institutions of higher learning in the hopes that there might be a grander

understanding of the world and human possibilities instilled in them. Sometimes this leads to an

awakening in the minds of a few who are capable of recognizing the poverty of the heritage from which

they came and beyond the finitude of their original traditions, and so peer into the immensity and

apparent infinite potential that exists in the world and universe as a whole. Most maintain their

relations and connections to their traditions. It would appear that most treat the opportunity to grow

beyond their traditions as a temporal hiatus from what has been imbued as an absolute, and are only

content as they return to the more familiar and that which can be safely and easily negotiated. This

really has nothing to do with a geographic situating but rather a social and cultural gravitation. Thus

education and knowledge are reduced to filling the minds library with facts and figures, history that is

considered mostly irrelevant, and philosophies that are little more than intellectual toys but seldom

considered with serious intent as the mind of genius groping with realities lesser minds can only write

off as fantasy or comprehend through navel gazing. And do not presume that I treat navel gazing with

any sort of contempt. Because contained in the concept of navel gazing is the notion that there exists

more than what is apparent to our five natural senses. But there exists a dimension of mind or spirit that

materialistic humanism fails to comprehend within the bounds of its predefined Newtonian-Cartesian

reality. This reality, though claiming the title scientific and denying the existence of what cannot be

measured or quantified or the divine, except as it may be explained as the byproduct of an actual

physical processes, though the word god is foreign to such a philosophy, this reality is every bit as

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religious and dogmatic as those that find no other explanation for truths beyond the limitations of their

own minds do through religion.

The secularist and the religionist are ultimately identical, because their shared ignorance exists

not in the difference of the quantity of facts and figures or natural processes, but it exists in the lack of

knowledge of knowing themselves as human beings. Whether this is a spiritual or a psychological depthof understanding makes little difference. What is spiritual and psychological may in fact be the

same.

They may be interrelated. They may be unique unto themselves. But whichever is the case both are

realities. Linguistics and semantics may overlap and be a confusing factor, and coming to common

definitions and understandings regarding the various and separate disciplines may hinder rather than

enhance the process of coming to knowledge that is universally recognized. But as there are minds

committed to the integrity of learning, and not the commitment to themselves or their traditions or

their ideologies, the evolution of the human mind will occur. And as minds and thinking evolve and

expand so does the reality we experience, first individually ultimately collectively.

But to willfully choose to think and act as a matter of preferred ignorance only renders more of the

same, religious or nonreligious. Ignorance knows no bounds.