What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You

I think it is a good thing to be curious. It is a good thing to want to know things. How many of you would describe yourselves as “curious”? If you are curious, you want to know things, but it also means that you are not satisfied with what you know now. You are convinced that there is more to know, more to find out. I think it is a good thing to be curious.

Do you know anyone who is a “know-it-all”? They are sort of annoying. One of the reasons that they are annoying is that they may not know it all, but they do actually know quite a bit! So the thing to do with a know-it-all is to be curious and ask them questions. Most of the time, they will have the right answer. The sad thing is that they are blind to any other reality except for the one that they already know. When they are wrong — they are really wrong.

What did Mark Twain say? “It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you in to trouble, it’s the things that you know for sure…that just ain’t so.” In other words: What you don’t know won’t hurt you; but what you know for sure…just might.

In order to become ordained ministers most of us have to go to seminary. At seminary, they don’t teach us a bunch of stuff that we then know for sure. If we go there with that attitude, they figuratively beat it out of us. What they teach us is how much we don’t know. The only thing they help us to know is when things “just ain’t so”. They didn’t teach us what to think, they taught us how to think. Over time I have observed that some of folks that have leapt into ministry without the benefit of such training have tended to be the ones that claim to know stuff for sure that just ain’t so.

From time to time, I think people are surprised about how many supposedly religious things I don’t believe in. I try to keep the things I believe to a minimum, so that people take those things I do believe seriously. In the same way, there are very few things that I really know for sure. When I am in a room with someone who thinks they know a bunch of things absolutely and for sure, I start edging toward the door.

When curiosity is allowed to flourish, this is what happens: The more you know, the more you realize how much there is that you do not know. And that is alright, because what you don’t know won’t hurt you. In fact, admitting that there is much that you don’t know might just be the first step toward real knowledge.