Because, in my own anecdotal experiences, I’ve always been told I’m the one that is closed minded as an Atheist.
Devoutly religious folks can be intelligent, they can be witty, they can be charming… They can be all good things. But one thing they are NOT; is open minded.
Because, doesn’t having an open mind work against the very fabric of blind faith?
Yep, I’ve been told the same thing.
ISTM that believers close their minds whenever something conflicts with their faith. Non-believers don’t like being wrong any more than anyone else does, but ISTM that they are less likely to deny facts.
Agnostics are the most open-minded. I think that’s pretty incontrovertible. Anyone who believes that he knows The Truth - whether that ‘truth’ is a religious version or an atheist version - is by definition going to be less open-minded than someone who believes he doesn’t know. And the more certain you are that you know the truth, the less open-minded you are.
ETA: Or did you mean open-minded in general, rather than specifically on religious stuff?
The question seems loaded with the unjustified assumption that being “open-minded” about everything is a virtue. It’s not. Sensible open-mindedness should be Bayesian, determined by the probability distribution given current evidence, and updated as new evidence is discovered. It’s not a superior position to be “agnostic” about an issue for which one alternative has a probability that’s indistinguishable from zero.
I’m open-minded or “agnostic” about string theory and creative solutions to the U.S. healthcare crisis. I’m not open-minded about any religion, since all major religious truth claims are utterly preposterous.
Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
I totally agree. I’m not saying that agnostic = more open-minded = better; just that agnostic = more open-minded.
Thank you. I wish your post could be engraved at the top of every thread about how “atheists” are just as unjustifiably dogmatic as religious folks because no-one knows one way or the other.
Read the rest of his post for comprehension.
A full atheist is probably going to deny not just gods, but also magic, superstition, karma, etc.
You could do the math per belief, and say that atheists are less open minded. Or you could say that religious people are open to magical things and atheists are open to the non-existence of magical things, so it breaks even.
Either we’re even or the religious are ahead. I don’t know that there’s any hard math one could do.
But I’ll vote with Riemann that “open minded” might not be a pejorative, but if there was a pejorative version of the phrase, it would be interesting to toss into the conversation.
ETA: Gullible, swayable, nondiscriminating
Perhaps “credulous”.
I’m a “full atheist.” My mind is fully open to evidence, of which there is nothing credible supporting anything supernatural, including the “god” portion of religion.
I’ve met religious folks who had the attitude “This is what works for me; I wouldn’t dare to presume what would work for you but I’m happy to talk about it any time”, which seems pretty open-minded to me. And I’ve met some closed-minded non-believers as well.
Well, open mindedness to me means willingness to change your world view when presented with a solid enough argument to do so.
I don’t know of very many devoutly religious people who are willing to do that WRT the nature of their own existence.
Being close-minded has nothing to do with a person’s religious beliefs or disbeliefs.
I feel, because we can never connect our minds to another’s and experience each other’s emotions, or read through their life in such depth as we can call upon our own memories, that we are all alone. We have words and other forms of communication that are, quite frankly, at best gross cudgels with with we shape society and the people around us. Take art as an example, why do we all not universally get the same inspiration or message from reading the same book or seeing the same painting? The artists poured their soul into their work over years, carefully working within the limitations of language and other external senses to craft, what is to them, a profoundly moving piece that was meant to inspire/enlighten others. Yet, try as I might, I still find poetry to be boring and unmoving.
Now to try and tackle your question, we both must work from the same definitions. We agree that there are endless gradations (shades) of meaning, from the most general to the most specific? If I asked you “what is closed-mindedness?” And you answered, “it is a person’s unwavering conviction in what they already believe despite the amount of contrary evidence shown to them.” Then that would still have not answered my question, because in my head I wanted an answer to a deeper question, what I unsuccessfully tried to ask was more like “even after some introspection I do not know why I, myself, internalize some information as truth with less rigor and skepticism as I do at other times with other bits of information. Have there been any psychology experiments done about this subject to help tell me why myself and other people need varying amounts/types of evidence/experience before our innate ‘gut feelings’ are overruled and slowly switched over to the new way of thinking?” Unfortunately, I do not know, so if anyone else has some of those papers I would like to read them.
I think that open/closed-mindedness is a form of protecting your own inner strength/drive. What makes you get up in the morning and be a productive person in our society rather than being a homeless, criminal, or a NEET (Not in Employment, Education, or in Training)? Did you learn at an early age from your parents/society/culture/etc that doing all those good habits (work, study, save for the future, respect your elders, praise God, have a family/children, don’t lie or steal, etc…) would lead you to having a good, fulfilling, life? Did you then later learn, through repeated consistent exposure to the real world, that some of those things are not necessarily true? To close your mind early and shrug off the injustices of the world, would make you good for society as a whole. To open your mind to the suffering and the possibilities of cheating the more idyllic thinking people, would allow you to further your own life and your family’s wellbeing. Why did you choose the balance that you did? Is the government all the God and Justice you need? What if you were presented wave after wave of various evidences that being true scum or giving up on life was the only satisfying answer? How open or closed would your mind be to rejecting everything you knew to be true, in favor of the promise that the new 180 degree bizarro you would be magnitudes happier? Now reflect upon that when we do the same thing to criminals or the suicidal or the religious and expect them to follow us towards our “enlightenment.”
This is sounding like a big dick contest while everyone is fully clothed.
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Would it be safe to say that you are not open-minded about the possibility that devoutly religious folks can be open-minded?
No. If that were the case, there would have been no need for me to start this thread.
I know open-minded religious people and closed-minded religious people and open-minded non-religious people and closed-minded non-religious people.
First, what makes you think religious people are necessarily religious out of blind faith?
Second, doesn’t open-mindedness relate, not to what you believe (or disbelieve) or have faith in, but to how willing you are to change that?
Heck, I often see people (and on this board, it’s usually atheists) who take a very prejudiced, closed-minded view, not just toward religious belief itself, but toward people who hold those beliefs. They hold views about religious people that isn’t based on solid evidence and wouldn’t stand up to serious, scientific examination.
Well, I guess you could call it reasoned faith. But what is the reasoning? You’re basically basing your reason off of stories that are thousands of years old. And despite seeing empirical evidence that a lot of these stories don’t hold water. People still chose to believe. That to me is blind faith.
I don’t know of any Christians that are willing to change their mind Jesus may not be their savior or that God didn’t create the universe.
There are a vast number of religious believers among the human race. In your OP you made a blanket statement about all devout believers, stating they are not open minded. You even put “not” in capital letters.
I have met believers of many religions who are eager to explore widely and consider viewpoints outside there own, and some who aren’t. I have met atheists who are eager to explore widely and consider viewpoints outside there own, and some who aren’t. I have met agnostics who are eager to explore widely and consider viewpoints outside there own, and some who aren’t. But you declared categorically that devout believers are not willing to change their worldview when presented with a solid enough argument. Perhaps you feel that you have a very solid argument for why religious believers should change their worldview, but other people, when seeing that same argument, don’t find it to be quite so solid.
I think it was pretty much implied in my thread title we would be painting with broad brushes. Of course there are outliers. Do we really need to quibble over semantics?