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Ignorance
United Communities of Spirit
Many religions regard the evils of the human condition as a result of ignorance. Being ignorant of the truth about Ultimate Reality and the purpose of life, people's values become confused, and consequently they act wrongly. In Hinduism and Jainism, this blindness (avidya) is what binds people to the wheel of birth-and-death (samsara). In Buddhism, this ignorance (mithyajnana) leads to grasping after self, and hence to error. In the Christian Bible, the apostle Paul taught that ignorance of God lay at the root of all forms of license and immorality. In Islam it is the condition of forgetting God; as a result, people ever since Adam have deviated from the path and lost their souls. Taoist sages condemn knowledge of worldly things as a source of confusion about true values, and similarly we find in many scriptures warnings against the illusory goals and vanities that infect worldly life.
[The] passages [are] arranged in roughly the following order: We begin with the practical observation that ignorance of Ultimate Reality spurs evil and demonic behavior. Next, it is due to ignorance, according to the religions of India, that humans are bound to suffer on the wheel of samsara, going through continual deaths and rebirths. Humanity's spiritual blindness is the subject of the third group of passages, beginning with passages which describe ignorance as a veil that obscures the faculty of insight. Other passages describe humanity's blindness by such metaphors as frogs in a well and moths drawn to perish in a lamp. In our blindness, we are attracted to the vanities of this world which are ephemeral and deceiving, according to the next group of passages. We conclude with passages which reason that even evil itself is an illusion or a bad dream.
Interfaith passages at: origin.org/ucs/ws/theme049.cfm
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