Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Why would anyone choose to be ignorant?

My favorite bread people, King Arthur Flour, emailed me a link to a delicious-looking no-knead pizza crust recipe. The recipe calls for the mixed dough to rest at least 16 hours or overnight above 72F. Upon posting a link in a forum I like to hang out in, someone asks "But isn't that dangerous?" *sigh* People love to take a tiny little bit of information, and apply it across the board to everything... without educating themselves further or finding out the facts. In fact, there are yeast sponges (which is all this dough base is, basically) that are *hundreds* of years old, kept alive at room temperature and fed new flour occasionally. Ever had New England sourdough? You've had a dough made from a portion of one of these old dough sponges, kept as a tradition (and because they taste frikken awesome).

This morning my neighbor (yes, *that* neighbor) decided to tell me a story about her oldest daughter, and how she called her last night crying because the daughter of the woman who has been housing her while she finishes school is "into wiccan". I looked at her, waiting for the rest of it, non-committally. "You know what that is, right? That's like... devil shit!" she says.

I will not go into all the other ways that this family has displayed its narrow-minded bigotry. Let's just say I feel sorry for any african-americans they call their friends. I should have known better when I found out they keep ONE book in their house... the bible... and that's all they'll read. It's not that anything else is forbidden, it's just that they're not really interested.

People who won't read other points of view, who are so intolerant of other views that they condemn them without really knowing all the facts, make me crazy. Why would you limit yourself in such a fashion? Why choose ignorance??

No, I am not wiccan... I'm not really anything, truth be told, although I was raised Lutheran. But I've made a point of studying several different world religions, including wicca, judaism, LDS, and Scientology. Purely out of curiosity and interest. Did you know that Christmas, Easter, and Halloween were originally pagan holidays and were co-opted by the christian church because they had a hard time recruiting followers who would give up the old holidays? Fascinating stuff.

But as I stood there, listening to my neighbor talk about "that evil, devil shit" I just thought "What would she do if I told her *I* was wiccan?" I mean, would she finally stop coming over to sponge off of me, or what?

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