"Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by..."

People are ignorant. This is a permanent part of the human condition (we have limited intellectual capacity, limited resources for developing those capacities, and limited will to do so). Thus, ignorance, just in itself, is not at all a moral defect. (In itself ignorance is purely intellectual, that is, in itself ignorance is not imputable to the will).

But people are not wholly ignorant (again, we do at least have limited intellectual capacity, limited resources for developing those capacities, and a limited will to do so). So ignorance, together with the concrete circumstances in which it arises, very often is connected to moral defect. (It very often does involve a defect of the will, i.e., evil choices.)

A priest-friend commented earlier this week to a small group of us that he simply couldn’t understand how so many people could go through life ignoring God, not praying, not seeking the truth, not seeking to know God’s will and plan for them. It utterly baffled him! His simply confessed bafflement made me smile and chuckle a bit, I’m not entirely sure why, but I suppose I felt a kind of delight because his bafflement, so frankly and simply expressed, is in fact so well justified: no matter how confused and ignorant people are (including, often, the seemingly most clever people), at bottom it is that simple and there’s nothing complicated about it: God is important and it’s very difficult to come up with any good excuses for failing to recognize that and do something about it.

“Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?”

(C.S. Lewis, “The Great Divorce”)