Sunday, November 15, 2020

When you believe to know

I have no problem with people who believe that Donald Trump should better have been re-elected, or that monarchy is better than democracy, or that wearing masks in the Covid-19 pandemic is useless, that the Bible is the Word of God or that Earth is flat.

As long as they say that they believe it. Most of them unfortunately say they know it.

Refusing to differentiate between knowing and believing can lead to idolatry, which is “always an attempt to establish certainty where it is both unwarranted and unearned”[1].

Is this just a problem of vocabulary? Am I too nit-picky? I’d rather say that it is a problem of education. Which in turn means that education is one of the biggest challenges for humanity if we want to live in peace on this planet.

Footnotes

[1]

Idolatry and Abortion by Vance Morgan on Patheos, 2020-02-02).

Four heroes of the digital era

The digital era brings new ways of becoming a hero. Here is a story about four volunteers working to maintain and protect information on Wikipedia about one of the great issues of our time:

The guardians of Wikipedia’s climate page

Best quote: “I read around 100 pages of information to edit one sentence, or to significantly change a sentence or two.”

I didn’t do any fact-check and I don’t plan to become a hero like those described in this story, but I have done enough Wikipedia editing and discussion to feel that this story is trustworthy. It also illustrates why I believe that every change to Wikipedia, even a minor typo fix, makes our human world grow a little bit closer towards the Kingdom of God. God bless the Wikimedia Foundation and the humans behind it.

While I like the story for its basic message, Trump supporters won’t like it because it unfortunately contains a few offending statements and is published by mashable.com who are, according to mediabiasfactcheck.com, “moderately to strongly biased toward liberal causes” and “might publish misleading reports and omit reporting of information that may damage liberal causes.”

This makes it unusable as an instrument of peace. Much more valuable would be articles about Wikipedia published by main-stream or even right-biased media.