We Are All Pretty Stupid

Why in the world did I name my site, “We Are All Pretty Stupid?” I can remember watching a video on the life of Hugh Nibley, a great religious scholar, and he said something that has always kept with me for years. “No one is really clever, no one is really brave, no one is really strong, no one is really wise, we are all pretty stupid you see,”

Hearing those words for the first the time hit me with a great amount of force which dramatically changed my way of thinking about how a person should approach learning.  Nibley alluded to the idea that the role for many who are pursuing an education is often doing it for all the wrong purposes. He spoke on how eminence and power fills the halls and rooms of university campuses, and that just because a person holds a degrees in a particular field doesn’t mean a person truly has received any kind of true education. The secret is that we shouldn’t take ourselves very seriously, and a true education is to never think that just because one has acquired a certificate or a degree, that means that one stops listening and learning like unto a child. Two things that Nibley incessantly repeats in the video is that what we can do perfectly is to forgive and repent.

The Greek rendering for repentance is to see things in a new way. We must continually remind ourselves how little we know and how ignorant we really are at times. Nibley mentioned that as a person starts to accumulate more and more training and education, the more a person ironically still tends to miss most everything. We tend to bypass so much by way of our fields of specialized training, especially when it comes to things that we have no background or training in at all. This isn’t to try to make individuals feel depressed, but simply to recognize that as we try to grow we must not do it at the expense of putting another person down by acting smarter than we really are.  Acquiring a formal education is great, but what’s even better is when you couple an education with an openness of a child-like attitude that isn’t filled with imminence, power and guile. The smartest people that I have come to know are those that realize that there is always something more to learn and who are not driven only to accumulate knowledge for the sole basis of outsmarting the other or putting the other down. Instead, one should freely impart his/her knowledge willingly and with brotherly love.

My purpose for this site, and especially this blog, is to do just that.  I wholeheartedly know that I’m no smarter than the person next to me or the person who may read this blog. I can always learn something new no matter the person’s age, race, beliefs, background, etc. I hope that whatever I write on this blog will be a place of learning not only for the reader, but for me also. Much of what I will write on will be about things that others have written. I’ll will try to share or attach links whenever I’m writing on topics that I feel that another has done a better job at explaining (which should be often).

If you’re passionate about topics of religion such as Mormonism, Book of Mormon, Book of Abraham, Bible, Comparative Religious Studies, Ritual and Myth, Throne Ascensions, Philosophy of Religion, along with other topics like Politics and Sports, then this place is for you! Hope you enjoy what I will soon be writing about in the near future. All my thoughts are my own and no one is required to believe my views. I may from time to time write about what another author has written but that doesn’t mean that I’m held responsible for representing all their viewpoints. Conversely, they are not responsible in representing my views with respect to their own.  Furthermore, what I write down isn’t meant to be written in stone. I, like you, am constantly growing and changing regarding my viewpoints of thought and belief. We must allow that space for us as individuals to grow and to mature in the quest of obtaining knowledge and truth. I hope together we will allow those accommodations. After all, we are all pretty stupid. May we never forget that straightforward insight when we approach topics such as religion, politics, science, etc.