Actually, thinking about it some more: If you’re a Christian who is willing to have an open mind to view points outside your own, you’re not really a Christian. You’re an Agnostic that leans towards Christianity.
Believing is binary, either you believe or you don’t.
It would be more helpful to look at the specific trends that are driving identification as “religious” or “non-religious” in various communities and then trying to see how open-minded people tend to be influenced in those circumstances.
From what I know of history and contemporary scholarship relevant to this effort, I would think you could find correlations with how open-minded people are and with specific religious identities, or in associated practices or stated beliefs (Like, agnostic upper-class American unitarian universalists might consistently more open-minded than their conventionally devout middle-class Southern Baptist neighbors). However, the OP’s broad question, offered without an attempt to rigorously define “religion,” isn’t an answerable one.
What are you basing your beliefs about religious people and their reasoning on? Have you, for example, read any books that purport to give a reasoned defense of Christianity?
I think most people are loath to change their basic beliefs about life, the universe, and everything, for various obvious reasons. But of course it does happen: there are religious people who lose their faith (or discover that they never really had it), and there are nonreligious people who find faith.
But there is one significant difference, at least in the case of Christianity: Christians are people who have made a commitment to Christ. Whereas atheists haven’t made that kind of commitment to anyone or anything. A Christian could change his/her mind about Jesus being their savior or God being the creator, and thus no longer be a Christian, but that would involve breaking a commitment. So in that case I guess you could say that religious folks (at least those who have made a commitment) are less “open minded” than nonreligious, in pretty much exactly the same way that married people are less “open minded” than single people—except that it’s less a matter of keeping one’s mind open than about keeping one’s options open.
Not only are the Christians you have met not fully representative of the diversity of Christianity on earth today, they are not fully representative of the many different traditions that have identified as Christian for the last two millennia. Furthermore, the Christians you have met (and obviously, you yourself) will have come from communities that have their own intellectual traditions, characteristics, cultural quirks, and localized diversity (which may often be very wide) that uniquely influence their perspectives and attitudes. Not to say that what you’ve associated with Christianity is completely invalid, but this is why people might be so resistant to broad-brush arguments or essentially arbitrary definitions of “Christian” advanced as somehow objective.
I think that probably describes more than half of all Christians, so may be a meaningless distinction. What if mainstream Christianity is just Christ-leaning agnosticism?
I don’t think that’s true. Strength of conviction or certainty in any particular thing is variable.
This isn’t necessarily true as a matter of logic nor is it particularly true of agnostics in practice IME.
Refusing to accept that a particular position is well established is in itself close minded. Most agnostics of my experience adopt strong agnosticism as a position from which they will not waver for reasons of tact and politics.
Thanks for that. After reading your post, I did a little research and found out Nontrinitarianism is a thing.
Good point. I regretted posting that after about five minutes and ten seconds of hitting submit.
Thinking that there is no God is equally as much a belief system, just not the same one as Christians. In many cases, the commitment you speak of for atheists is to science and logic. Personally, being the analytical type, I find it most agreeable to put my faith in science. Spirituality doesn’t just disappear because one doesn’t believe in a/some god(s).
The central tenet of my personal philosophy is a slight modification of the Platonic maxim, theoretically attributed to Socrates:
In other words, I know only that I don’t know, because I have not seen. (My phrasing, and it’s slightly different than the popular misinterpretation, “I know only that I know nothing.”) It’s the literal form of the term agnostic. There’s an epistemological issue with that, which I won’t get into because it can be very confusing and I don’t want to muddy the waters too much.
But believing that is only the beginning. The question then naturally occurs, Is there a God and, if so, what is he/she/it like? What evidence is there for its existence? For me (again acknowledging that I don’t know), my theory is that since there is no hard evidence that we know of and never has been, there is no such creature. The implications get very complex from there.
This is a slightly longwinded way of saying that being atheist doesn’t mean I don’t have a belief system. My sense is that it’s the same for other atheists, though they may not follow the same logic that I do.
From The Skeptic’s Creed, a poem by Tom Curry.
In my experience, there’s not a strong correlation between either. I know some religious people who pretty much believe that if you don’t believe what they believe, you’re wrong. I also know some who are quite open to alternative views and are even close friends with people of all faiths and non-religious or atheists equally. Similarly, I know some atheists who will classify pretty much anything remotely religious as not good or even downright evil, and some who are equally accepting of people of various faiths.
In fact, I’d go a step farther and say that, in general, most people I’ve met, religious or not, have generally been pretty open minded, it’s really only been the ones that are devout in their beliefs, theist or atheist, that seem to think that those with differing views are close-minded. But really, I think that’s a consequence of the idea that being close-minded is a pejorative, and even though they are, will find some way to defend against that idea. Hell, I’ve even these sorts of people argue that they’re appropriately open-minded and that some people are so open-minded that their brains might fall out.
And to a certain point, I agree there, that there is a point where one can be TOO receptive of other ideas. As in, if you run into someone that believes in a flat-Earth and that we’re all meat puppets under the control of a giant space Kraken put on Earth with the entire purpose of warring for its amusement, I’m going to be pretty darn incredulous. If someone has a view I’m more familiar with, or even an uncommon one with some rationale behind it, I’ll be more accepting.
And to that point, it seems to me that everyone pretty much probably believes that they’re at an appropriate point on the spectrum of open-minded to close-minded and will start to accuse others too far away from them on there from being in the wrong spot, and the more strongly one holds certain beliefs, particularly ones they hold to be unfalsifiable, chances are, the more likely they’ll hurl those sorts of accusations at others.
When I Google the phrase “Belief System” the first words I see are
and definitions from various following sources pretty much say the same thing.
I’m sorry, but thinking that something doesn’t exist because sufficient evidence hasn’t been brought forth to show that it does(or even can) exist is not a “Belief System”.
If you are an atheist who is willing to have an open mind to view points outside your own, I assume you would agree that that person is not an atheist.
Thus all atheists are closed-minded by definition.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve met openminded and closeminded people in both groups. I also don’t think there is a strong correlation.
Bull. I am an atheist, and I am open-minded to all evidence brought before me for whatever deity you wish to promote. If you’ve got nothing to show me, I’ve got nothing to keep an open mind about, do I?
And believers would be closedminded as well.
I have a friend who insists that one cannot be a critical thinker and have a belief in any kind of God. I feel that is close minded. I have never cared for the word God but I do like to think some form of superior intelligence exists. Some athiests like to insinuate that if a god existed he would be magic. No evidence of anything magic I can think of but I see plenty of evidence on intelligent design.
Exactly my thought.
You are not an atheist, according to Grrr!'s definition.
Regards,
Shodan
And that evidence would be…?
Frank Ghery, IMHO.