Prime-evil Ignorance

I think I have read too much of Ray's writings, as he and I seem to have had similar dreams recently, as described in his latest post. Here's mine...

I dreamed I was a doctor. I was stationed in the darkest of places, fighting a deadly disease among a very primitive tribe. This tribal group were particularly vicious by nature, and what’s more, they didn’t like me at all. Their witch doctors made up stories about how I was an evil being because I didn't believe dancing naked around a fire could make their lives better.

Their primitive beliefs were certainly strange. They were utterly convinced there was a magic, invisible man at all places at all times. They were utterly convinced that he sneezed them into existence a few thousand years, and that they originally came from a pile of dust.

In the dream, I wanted to run from their abuse, from their constant name calling, from their history of burning doctors at the stake and stoning them to death. But I couldn’t because I knew that they needed to be inoculated, or they would all die from their brains atrophying from a lack of exercise. My job was to convince them that they were in serious danger and that they needed to hold still while I plunged a needle into their hard, stubborn flesh . . . a difficult task indeed.

It was hard because these tribal people were particularly arrogant and naive, and thought that they needed nothing and knew everything. When asked how, they said that the magic man knew everything and therefore they knew everything.

They were so primitive in their thinking that they made up superstitious claims for completely natural phenomena. They actually believed diseases were caused by bad acts they had done to make the magic man angry. So they were particularly resistant to the belief that there were natural, observable microorganisms causing the disease and it had nothing to do with their bad acts, and that the deadly disease that was killing them was being promoted by their unsanitary lifestyle. I could not convince them to merely take scientific preventative measures to combat the disease, as they insisted dancing naked around the fire would rid them of it. If that didn't work, that simply meant one of the people were not dancing hard enough.

Then I awoke to the fact that it wasn’t a dream at all, and that I have a difficult task ahead of me, but one from which I will not run.

I find it funny that we enlightened, rational individuals who have been elevated to a never before seen level of knowledge due to scientific progress and discoveries are the primitive tribe in his dream. Isn't that odd? He is, after all, the one basing his life entirely on some writings by some Bronze Age tribesmen living in the desert a few millenia ago... and we're the primitive ones because we do not believe the primitive superstitions in a book of dubious origins and authors?

Well, what else can you expect from a mind which is plagued by such primitive beliefs?