Last night I was putting together a module for a class and had to deal with the Sumerian culture. Anytime I deal with a culture before the scientific revolution, I am taken aback by the sheer amount of ignorance that was in the people's lives and how much of their belief in the unknown was notional and fabricated. Of course, they didn't know better.
I know that someday, the people of another future time will look on us the same way. What we call science today will be taken for granted as known fact for centuries and as commonly known as our knowledge about the sun around which we rotate. They will look at us and wonder how we existed in such ignorance.
Yesterday I was studying a part of the New Testament that few people read anymore. I was struck by its coherence and parallelism, but I also knew that many just dip in and read a stretch of verses once in a while and miss the coherence and parallelism. Yet, they persist in some belief that the stretch of verses "taught" them even though the larger context and historical context might lead to a different understanding.
All of the above makes me know that the amount of knowledge I may have is small, temporary, and foundational for people living in some future society. That leads me away from feeling smug. It leads me right into feeling humble, sometimes insignificant. It makes me want to live forever so that I can keep up with the knowledge curve, keep up with the leading edge of discovery.
But, I know that I will not live forever in the environment I want to stay in. But, that does show my ignorance. I will live forever in an environment I have no knowledge of, but trust that it is so much different, so much more splendid, so much more filled with knowledge that I might as well die now because it may be another 5000 years before people on earth attain to the knowledge of an inkling available in the eternal world. I think I just talked myself out of staying around here forever.
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