In a large town of Central Europe many centuries ago, right in the middle of the city, a brothel was open. It was extremely popular amongst both the old and the young, for all the women there were the prettiest of the entire region.
Once, a sudden accident happened, a shockingly serious one. There was, in fact, a secret door in the basement, which nobody knew even existed, and that door was indeed connected to the innermost cavities of Hell. One day, as everybody was partying and drinking and having a good… well… laugh, a demon came out and ate everybody.
Only two or three testimonies managed to escape and survive, forever traumatized by that experience.
People were shocked, and nobody ever entered in that brothel again. Actually though, 6 months later, an announcement was made that the door has been fixed with a couple wooden boards and some nails. Nobody really believed that those boards would have stopped anything from passing through that door, especially a ferocious demon. That being said, everybody pretended that was exactly the case.
They kept drinking and partying and laughing with the ladies.
This is the difference between ignorance and denial. When you’re ignorant, a piece of information is missing to you, you just don’t know that it’s there. When you’re in denial instead, from a conceptual point of view at least, you know everything there is to know. You just like to laugh girls so much, that you’re willing to forget about the damn demon.