On the Obvious

I jotted this down in study hall today.

King Solomon was supposedly the greatest kind that ever lived. When he had first started his rule, God came to him in a dream and said that he would give Solomon whatever he asked for. [1 Kings 3:4-15]. When Solomon merely asked for the ability to be a good ruler, God gave him wisdom beyond what anyone else had ever, or will ever, have.
Solomon was a wise man.
Now then, in Ecclesiastes 1:6, Solomon states, "The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course." [NIV]
Solomon is of course talking about the futility of trying to do anything on the earth-everything you do will eventually be washed away just like Incan history.
But there's something really cool here.

Solomon specifically uses the words, "...to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes..."

Does anyone else notice something about his wording?
why yes.
you there, in the back.
THE EARTH IS ROUND.
So if Solomon knows that the Earth is round, how come it took western Europe all the way until Christopher Columbus before they realized it wasn't flat?
how does that make sense?

Easy.
People are completely irrational.
Seriously, in the 1300s, people honestly thought that if you sailed far enough, you'd fall off the face of the earth- like in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Now adays (and in Solomon's days), we know this to be ridiculous. But 700 years ago, it was perfectly accepted.

It's really easy to sit here and make fun of Humanity's past blunders.
Slavery, Woman's Rights (what a blunder that turned out to be...), Lobotomies, putting radon in water and calling it healthy, eating phosphorous, pleather pants, and huffing paint are all excellent examples of things that are blatantly dumb, yet many people thought nothing of.

Example: Education.
For the past decade, teaching curricula[curriculums] have made breakthroughs in how they teach teenagers. We realize that you can't force a teenager to learn when he doesn't want to... so naturally the strategy is in making highschoolers want to learn.
Any teenager could tell you that. But before post-modern times, there was this thing that we now call "traditional" education. You know, you expect the kids to listen to teachers and learn and get good grades.

How about oil?
No one ever cared about foreign oil until it got expensive, and now its too late- our economy is 100% dependent on the Middle East. Scary? yes.
Preventable?
not anymore.
We should have been smarter than to base our whole transportation network on the presumption that oil would always be available.

How about pollution?
Global Warming was a joke until Al Gore got some graphs... and then it was hilarious.
Then the ice caps started melting and people realized that there's no more glaciers in Glacier National Park.
Now people are going nuts about it; carbon credits are traded publicly between companies, and hundreds of billions of dollars are frantically being spent trying to remedy the problem.
Maybe next time, we can think before we release trillions of pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Enron, the Great Depression, the titanic sinking, coal mines collapsing and cities burning from coal slag, the Love Canal, the Bell Telephone trustbusters... these are all things that happened because people didn't bother to be rational about them.
Dumping toxic waste next to a residential community will cause members of that community to die from toxic waste.
Crashing headlong into an iceberg will sink your ship.
Stealing countless amounts of money from stockholders will get you in jail.
These are simple concepts.
The earth is round.


But as a society, isn't it naive to think that there aren't modern incarnations of these things?
When asked, most people would say that they're glad they live in today- look at how much we know! and look at how many mistakes humanity has made. But what about the mistakes that we are currently making?
Drugs, abortion, and gay marriage are all hot topics in today's political world.
Plenty of people are in favor of legalizing pot, having abortions, and gay marriage.
What they don't realize is that these things are just as irrational and wrong as believing that the earth is flat.
We should try to be more like Solomon... wise.