If you were to take a cross section of all the strictly devout religious people in the world, a certain percentage would know some amount of their own scripture with a less than 100% degree accuracy, a smaller percentage would not know very much at all, and what they did know would be wildly inaccurate, and a much smaller percentage would know all their scriptures and doctrines to a very high, but still imperfect level. The thing all of these people would have in common is that they hold the beliefs they possess to be true, and many hold them to be the ULTIMATE truth. The fact that they have an incomplete or perhaps even inaccurate picture doesn’t matter, their faith is strong.

There is a similarity here with regard to how all people interact with the world in general. We have a certain amount of general knowledge, and from this we carve out a slice of what we call reality. This reality is not couched in hard fact so much as what we think is true given the information we have at any particular moment, or what sounds good to us at the time. In fact our attachment to our own personal versions of reality is so strong that even when we encounter information that is blatantly contrary to something we believe, many of us will still hold onto those outdated beliefs rather than facing the idea of changing our world view.

If history has proven anything, it’s that the knowledge held by any era is either flawed, incomplete, or entirely inaccurate. Of course due to the egotistic nature of human beings, we’ve always assumed that we were at some pinnacle of knowledge and that most of the major discoveries to be made were behind us. The fact of the matter is that we have barely scratched the surface in terms of unlocking the mystery of this world and the universe as a whole. The wise person will keep their beliefs fluid and not get too attached to any particular world view. The alternative is being the equivalent one of the “world is flat” people from back in the late 1400s, and do you really want to be that guy? Or girl?