What We Don't Know

I said yesterday that Washington Square in New York City is haunted.  I would suggest that most any place where there are masses of dead buried is haunted.  And by being haunted, I don’t mean there are ghosts, spirits, ghouls, and goblins roaming the grounds, but that the dead bring their own kind of haunting to places where the dead have been buried.  It just so happens that even in New York City where there are masses of people roaming the parks and places where the dead have been buried, there are reported sightings of things that can’t be explained.  In fact, I would suggest that there is a kind of haunting of most any place in this world. 

There is much about this world that can’t be explained.  There is much about this universe we simply don’t know.  And to complicate things even further, there is much about God that isn’t known by those who believe in God.  We live with the unknown every day.  It is up to us to learn as much as we can about this world and the universe we live in. 

But it seems to me that a lot of our knowledge now comes from what we read on Facebook or watch on videos on YouTube.  We are spoon fed the news every day that is filtered by sponsors.  News broadcasts care more about the number of viewers they attract than what is actually reported as facts, because there isn’t the money in facts.  If factual information was reported by news outlets here in the US, they would lose money.  It used to be that this is what news did for networks in the US.  As a public service, news outlets reported on the facts even though there wasn’t money made in such reporting.  So, the fact is, we can think we are getting smarter by sitting down in front of our TVs and turn to any news broadcast and believe we are getting facts, when all we are getting is information; and that no one really seems to care that that information is either good or bad.  We think information is learning, when what we are getting now aren’t really facts.  

It now takes longer to get facts than it did say 20 years ago before TV news cared about ratings and making money.  And there is no much information that comes from so many sources that we can end up believing ANYTHING as a fact, when all it is is nothing more than the reality of someone else.  We live with so much information that we think is knowledge that we don’t have time to sort it out ourselves and thus, we are becoming dumber instead of smarter.  We have to realize that no one really talks about facts, but that opinions are considered to be facts.  Neil DeGrass Tyson boldly says that science is fact.  I like to read scientific studies, but even then, we have to be careful.  We can believe that something is factual like the tobacco companies having had doctors promote the health benefits of smoking as fact, when research had shown that tobacco causes cancer.  And it’s like this with anything that is a study sponsored by some group.  We don’t always know who is sponsoring a study.  It is said we know more today than we have ever known before, but the problem is that we know more opinion than we know facts.  We live with a lot of beliefs.  Even a psychotic can believe he or she will never die.  It’s been proven that everyone dies regardless of what one believes. 

I am Brother Ralphie writing for my Angels from The Angels of Life Institute.  Peace. Brother Ralphie works from his study for the promotion of Peaceful living and inner Peace with God. He calls this the “Sanctity of Human Life Movement.”