How can I describe that feeling... the one where I realize I probably know more about the world around me than a significant percentage of the world population?

     I feel morally obligated to tell people that their vision of reality is complete and utter crap... and that mine probably is too.

     I know, you might say, "So what? Different doesn't mean crap, it just means different." Ordinarily, I'd agree to some extent but you'd be missing the point.

     First, I know a lot more physics than the average person. That's about how the world works at a basic level. I know this for two reasons. I read books about it in my spare time. I've also taken a college course. No, that doesn't make me an expert, but it does mean I know better than someone who hasn't done any of those things and it changes the way I see the world around me. I can't seem to find a reliable chart anywhere, but to the best of my memory (please correct me) three full years of college make me more educated than 80% of Americans. That's just college in general, I'm not sure how much bigger the number is when talking about sciences in particular.

     Second, both modern philosophy and modern science tell me that the things we know right now are no better than working approximations of the truth, if truth exists at all. That is to say, the crap isn't bad, it's just not technically correct. Sometimes the uninformed try to convert others to their religion and attack science at the same time by talking about how science is always "changing it's mind", or continually getting things wrong and only replacing the wrong things with things that are shown to be also wrong at a later time. Some people have a problem with all that wishy-washy-ness... I have simply integrated it into my worldview. I don't know anything for sure, but there are plenty of little things I would still bet my life on. Like gravity not vanishing suddenly while I am sleeping. Like the world still being there when I cannot see it. There is absolutely no way to prove that it will be there, but we trust that it will and don't think about it too much because we could really drive ourselves insane trying. (Read Kant and Nietzsche.)

     Ignorance about the world feels a little similar to handing a kid a loaded gun with the safety off and telling him/her to figure it out. The trouble is that we've all got that loaded gun in our hands, and we have no idea what to do with it. Thus when someone tells me something like "Wine has cells" I can't help but feel a little spike of dread inside (while I laugh at the poor sod). Science, to me, is the admirable process of trying to figure out how the gun works without blowing someone's head off in the process.

     You probably know how a gun works and why we usually don't give them to little children without extensive instruction. I feel a little like I'm staring down the barrel of that untrained gun when someone tries to talk me into religion. Yes, science gets people killed, but for the most part they are trying not to. There is a big difference between trying not to and not trying to. Religion says "I have a gun, follow me or you might be down range when it goes off!" That's why it's scary to know things. You might have half an idea how dangerous the gun (reality) is and can't help telling people to stop waving it around like lunatics. It's not just religions that do the waving, it's anybody who knows less than anyone else. To their credit, most religions say a lot about how not to wave the gun. The part that rankles me the most is the hypocrisy of the message itself. There is a lot of "love your neighbor, but only if he worships the same way you do" going on. I get told what not to do plenty often: sometimes I don't listen and things go wrong.

     Sometimes it turns out I had the right idea anyway and they were barking up the wrong tree. That's another reason to be scared. Respectable people in the know don't always know. I heard that some physics team is in the process of proving Stephen Hawking wrong about something for just about the first time in his life. He came up with big bang theory, in case you were wondering. I look out on the world and I am scared by the things other people don't know... scared of how many of them there are... then I look ahead to those who know even more than me and it scares me even more that I may never understand enough. I may get my finger around the trigger of the universe and never know it before I set the whole thing off. I still don't know for sure that there is anything to know in the first place. So, I've now described somewhat the depth of my title statement of self-disclosure. I'll restate: my worldview is crap, but it's better than a lot of other crap and not just because it's mine, but because I know what kind of crap it is. Until I find out what the Truth is, I'm going to keep doing the best I can.