I'm ignorant

I pitched in with my two cents last night; and now I'm ignorant. I'm well over 100 laps through my own little Daytona 500 of life. So it came as a bit of a shock that at this stage of the race I'm considered ignorant.

Let me provide some context.

A young friend of mine, a bright and thoughtful individual, posted something on Facebook about atheists. I wasn't creeping on Facebook so I didn't catch on until late in the evening, and by the time I arrived at the discussion, there were over 120 comments.

Footnote: It should come as no surprise that any thread to do with religion (or the lack thereof) will generate significant (strong) opinions.

                  I hear these guys got into it, too...

I wish I could give you direct quotes and provide the full context but, alas, the thread has been removed. Perhaps my young friend decided that enough mud-slinging had been accomplished; or maybe the sheer weight of comments was threatening to crash his Facebook page. Who knows?

The crux of my ignorance seems to stem from a comment I made in jest concerning the formation of the universe, the earth and everything. Proponents of the Big Bang theory believe that a long time ago, our universe was in an extremely hot and dense state. Then we had some rapid expansion causing rapid cooling which allowed energy to be converted into various subatomic particles. And so on and so forth until, voila!, here we are.

         I think this sums it up nicely

In my rush to be pithy, I commented that the last time I checked, 0 x 0 = 0.

You would have thought I'd called Einstein a crackpot.

By my cleverly accurate but totally irellavent mathematical formula, I apparently set off the scientific equivalent of the Atheist alarm and one of the participants got all huffy about it and called me ignorant. Or at least posited that my inference was ignorant; assuming that my inference meant that it was impossible for the Big Bang theory to adequately account for the development of life as we know it.

We got off into all sorts of finger-pointing and counter-inferring and all that; well, he did because I didn't even check the thread again until I was getting ready for bed and by that time it was way too late for me to rustle up enough motivation to worry about it. So I issued a quick apology for my ignorance and went to sleep, figuring I'd visit the thread this morning and explain my position in more detail. But alas, the thread has disappeared faster than a gamma ray burst.

The thing I find most ironic about this entire series of events is that it was the participant on the science side of the aisle - whom I assume is an atheist - who resorted to name calling. Normally the Christians will get all defensive about people attacking the idea that God created the universe and everything in it. To paraphrase, name-calling is the last recourse of the weak minded.

So who is really ignorant here?

I don't know; what do you think?

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