Ignorance

How are ignorance and superstition related?

Esoteric vs Exoteric. Max suggests that first one must reject the exoteric before one can appreciate the esoteric. At first, Huck's understanding of truth beyond what he experiences is tied into Miss Watson's and Aunt Sally's exoteric understanding of the Bible, and superstition, which he hears from others, including Jim.


Chapter 1.
Huck is convinced by Tom to return to the Widow Douglas' home by offering him a chance to join his newly formed band of robbers.
So we start out with the quaint observation that Huck and Tom are going to play at being robbers. Innocent enough. As a child I played cowboys and indians, and inevitable, someone got shot. Noone really was harmed (whether we should have assumed the indians were the bad guys is another story).
So on the one hand, it's just pretend, right? Or will there be evidence later on, much as there was in Tom Sawyer, that people will actually be harmed? 
If so, and if Huck knows this as early as Chapter 1, then in fact we come to the first stop of the spectrum of Huck's formation- he is unaware that he is, or will be, hurting people by playing the robber role.
Moral ignorance? What do we call this?

Chapter 2

Tom forms his band of robbers. One of the conditions is that if someone betrays the gang, his family must be killed. Huck has no family (at least noone knows whether his Dad is dead or alive). But Huck, about to be disinvited to the gang, offers that Miss Watson could be killed. The gang agrees so Huck is allowed to join the gang.

This moral ignorance, with no basis in reality or experience, but only fantasy, seems like a setup for a crisis. Eventually the opportunity to kill someone for real will present itself, and the clash of fantasy and the real will represent a growth event along the path to compassion and love.


Chapter 5

Here Huck encounters his father, 'Pap'. Pap has heard that Huck can read, and has money. Now Huck is not really educated, but compared to Pap, he is learned, and Pap proceeds to deride Huck for purposely trying to denigrate and embarrass his Father by educating himself. No matter that Huck himself has not really sought out an education, but has been forced to submit by the widow and Miss Watson.
In an almost throwaway line, Pap says that he has heard that he has got religion too.

Chapter 8

I don't know if it really is right to call it humor, but at the end of the chapter, Jim claims that he is still rich because he is worth eight hundred dollars, the amount that the widow was going to sell him for to the slave trader. Something in the statement makes me smile, that Jim takes some sort of pride in the fact that he is worth so much money.