Many religions regard the evils of the human condition as a result of ignorance.
Being ignorant of the truth about Ultimate Reality and the purpose of life, people's values become confused, and consequently they act wrongly. In the Christian Bible, the apostle Paul taught that ignorance of God lay at the root of all forms of license and immorality. Taoist sages condemn knowledge of worldly things as a source of confusion about true values, and similarly we find in many scriptures warnings against the illusory goals and vanities that infect worldly life. Next, it is due to ignorance, according to the religions of India, that humans are bound to suffer on the wheel of samsara, going through continual deaths and rebirths. Humanity's spiritual blindness is the subject of the third group of passages, beginning with passages which describe ignorance as a veil that obscures the faculty of insight.