Good read on the attainment of perfection and accepting our flaws.
IMO ignorance is chiefly a lack of knowledge. If you drop someone who has no knowledge of cars into a mechanics shop and tell them to fix a car, they’re going to be really incompetent and look bad compared to the mechanic. But, if they had car manuals to read and learned some mechanical engineering and watched the mechanic work and spent time tinkering with the engine, they could figure it out.
Stupidity is a failure of logic and self-reflection, like continuing to insist that obviously wrong things are true when presented with undeniable facts (“this isn’t a car at all, it’s a plane, nobody can fix planes, that’s why I’m failing!”) holding two ideas that are in opposition to each other and not acknowledging the dichotomy (“all car mechanics are really stupid but they make these cars so complicated that no reasonable person could ever figure it out”), flip-flopping back and forth between statements, blaming other people or things (“this is all Big Oil’s fault”) and generally not thinking things through.
Both might make equally terrible cars at first but ignorance is a lot more fixable and might not be the person’s fault (like if they grew up Amish and never saw a car’s engine before), while stupidity is more about refusing to learn or self-correct when given the option.
I just feel like that’s too subjective to be useful in anyway.
My uncle is a bishop and has a doctorate in theology for example. Is he stupid? There are numerous contradictions and denial of “facts” when it comes to such a perspective, but is it “stupidity”?
I’d also argue that facts change all the time and there are paradoxes that we haven’t been able to reconcile even now; is that stupidity?
I understand where you’re coming from. I just don’t feel like it’s a term that helps anyone.
It’s just used to deride a perspective that we ourselves don’t hold. It would be stupid to deny gravity, but it it’s also something we don’t really understand. Is it stupid to believe and accept without understanding?
There’s nuance to it, for sure. In the case of religion, I think it can be either or neither. If someone makes a bad faith-based choice because they’ve been raised in a cult, or they’re a kid who has been fed a lot of religious doctrine but doesn’t have any real world experience, or they live in a super religious community and only know scary lectures about atheists or people of other faiths, that’s ignorance. They don’t know any better and don’t have many avenues to fix that. If it’s something like Steve Jobs doing spiritual juice cleanses instead of getting cancer treatment despite having all the best medical resources and doctors in the world available, that’s stupidity. If it’s somebody who has a religious belief but doesn’t let that affect their decision-making detrimentally (they believe in miracles, but they’ll still go to the doctor for treatment when they’re sick) then they’re not stupid or ignorant. They may not be totally right but that’s some other fallacy - being too optimistic? Rose colored glasses? - that’s less harsh than stupidity or ignorance.
Your question about believing without understanding is a good one. There are a lot of things people believe without total understanding or proof. I believe Canada exists even though I’ve never been there. I suppose the difference there is the possibility of learning and proving it, as well as common consensus - I could go to Canada, I can talk to Canadians, I can see that Canada competes in the Olympics and is labeled on a globe. There are lots of different ways to verify it, and if all of the maps in the world vanished overnight people would find Canada again. But if I believed in a new undiscovered continent named Lemmy then I’d have to insist on believing it’s there despite there being no Lemmy citizens, no flag, no presence on a map, and so on, which makes it a much sketchier thing to ‘believe’ in than Canada.
