Fleur De Lis said:

"Religious ignorance is the most difficult of all forms of ignorance to clear up because it is closely allied with the irrationalities of the emotional life. A bad mathematician can with practice cure his weakness; so can poor spellers or insufficient linguists; but a person suffering from religious ignorance is not only entirely oblivious of his limitations, but is generally proud of them, resisting fanatically any effort to improve his state. Also, if you interfere with his convictions, no matter how stupid or malicious they may be, you are trespassing upon his inalienable right to freedom of worship and belief. You can call him ignorant in any of the branches of the arts, sciences, or trades, and he will likely agree with you, but if you tell him that his religious viewpoints are without a semblance of sanity he will rise in righteous wrath and hate you until the end of his days.
Yet if you pin one of these zealots down and demand of him what he actually knows about philosophy, transcendentalism, mysticism, magic, metaphysics, and new thought, he will probably not be able to give you even a reasonably good definition of any one of these terms. He is full of convictions, but his notions hang on such a shaky framework that they would be regarded as utterly worthless in any department of accredited scholarship."

— Manly P. Hall

Art: The Allegory of Virtue and Vice, Lorenzo Lotto, year 1505

Click to expand...