Open mindedness

[hypothetical fact]

Open mindedness doesn't work, you need both the victim and the abuser to be open minded otherwise the victim will see that their belief goes unchallenged and strengthen their faith in it, no matter how wrong it is. You also get the problem where being open minded becomes an insult where if you don't accept their opinion you are labelled a close minded fool.

If you want open mindedness to work all parties must tolerate eachother equally. But if even one member of those parties disagrees about accepting the other belief they get told to shut up because it is so much easier to call someone ignorant than address their complaint. Once that happens these people that feel downtrodden gather friends who feel the same way and that is how extremists and radicals form.

This is actually where we are in reality, where tolerance only subverts hatred until it boils over in suicide or murder. The alternative is to argue with the opposing group until both parties learn something about the others views and one view takes dominance. The problem with this is that the misguided like to use their opinion and freedom to argue with everyone whether they are right or not. It creates less long term problems than tolerance but it causes hatred to focus on certain areas. On this website there is an unjustified hate of religion where 99% of the members haven't even read the bible while they call it crap. Other areas of hatred are Newgrounds forums and 4chan.

Yes Newgrounds and 4chan have horrible communities but they must be allowed to scream at the wall because it lets them feel like they have a voice.

Oh and FYI minority groups love preaching tolerance which is why I hate them so much.

 

[mangus]

I believe humans and apes have a similar ancestor, and we branched off, remaining relatively close, but never actually joining. I site the 'evolve or die' section of survival of the fittest. If we evolved from apes, apes would have, logically, died out.

it would be hard to have evolved from all of the apes.
<a href=http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?q=ape&search=search>Ape

 

[hypothetical fact]

I believe humans and apes have a similar ancestor, and we branched off, remaining relatively close, but never actually joining. I site the 'evolve or die' section of survival of the fittest. If we evolved from apes, apes would have, logically, died out.

it would be hard to have evolved from all of the apes.
<a href=http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?q=ape&search=search>Ape

We might be the fittest ape but only because we changed our environment to make us the fittest. Put a human in the jungle and ape in the city without any time for preperation and they will both die off.

 

[Seldon2639]

Perhaps I can explain it better than I did the first time.

Open mindedness is a concept that is dwindling in modern society, which, I believe, is adding to social collapse. No matter how you feel on something, what your opinion is, someone within the group of people who believe it is closed minded. Again, doesn't matter what the opinion is.

Open mindedness isn't the 'acceptance' of new ideas, but rather a bit of a consideration.

An idea may have merit, though you may not agree with the method or ideology.

The only real example I can think of at this point is my view on evolution.

I don't believe humans evolved from apes.

I believe humans and apes have a similar ancestor, and we branched off, remaining relatively close, but never actually joining. I site the 'evolve or die' section of survival of the fittest. If we evolved from apes, apes would have, logically, died out.

However, while I may not believe it, I understand that there are mounds of evidence suggesting that we did, in fact, evolve from apes. However, I am still not convinced. I understand why someone else would believe that, and there is no obvious flaw in logic, it is simply what I believe.

Maybe that clears things up.

It clears up your stance, but doesn't make you any more correct. If one has considered all other viewpoints, found them lacking, and ascribed to his own, he is not being "closed minded", he is rather simply being conclusive. You're falling into a very common trap about the discussion of biases and open-mindedness, which is to presume (a) that any given discussion on a topic is the first a person has thought about it, and (b) that open-mindedness requires some measure of perpetual fence-straddling. If what you're saying is that you assume that any person who by the time he's reached college has come to a conclusion, it must be because he hasn't really considered all the possible answers, you're being a bit closed-minded yourself.

For me to look at the evidence for both theism and atheism and say "yep, atheism makes more logical sense", and thus brook no disagreement isn't being closed-minded, it's having made a decision. To be able to understand how one comes to a conclusion different from yours isn't being open-minded, it's being analytical.

Belief cannot be validated by belief alone. It is not the true shibboleth. And consideration of an idea does not have to take the form of illogical promulgation of incorrect ideas. If I say that two plus two equals five, you don't have to "consider" whether I might be right in order to not be closed-minded.

Similarly, if you say the moon is made of cheese, I do not need to go do in-depth research about the validity and opposing arguments. Your belief wouldn't pass the laugh test, and doesn't merit consideration. So, if I've done the study, and thought about it, and concluded that God does not exist, then from my perspective anyone who has not done the research is themselves closed-minded. They've not spent the time to truly analyze critically and rationally their own beliefs (as I have), and thus they deserve no respect.

Your desire to be open-minded thus would actually exculpate the closed-minded from ever having to open their minds. Alternative medicine doesn't work. I don't need to "consider" whether it does, since I've got the entire medical community (by which I mean the actual doctors) behind me.

So don't tout a close-minded desire to be open-minded as anything other than crap. If one side is right, they're right. If one side is reasonable, they're reasonable. To ask the reasonable and right to reconsider being unreasonable and wrong is silly.

Edit: before you say "see, you're just as closed-minded as I said", bear in mind that I've actually done the research. I may be biased toward rationality and logic, but I doubt you'd find many people to say that it's closed-minded to believe in science and reason... Except for religious people, but they're closed-minded about giving credence to feelings and stories.

Your agnosticism seems to lend validity to my belief that you enjoy your position on the fence, and would like to tout the virtues of it, but I don't buy it. Either there's evidence god exists, or there isn't. To pick any other position is to simply cop out of the discussion, and that's not any more open-minded than to have picked a side based on ones own experiences and conclusions.

 

[Matronadena]

I don't believe humans evolved from apes.

I believe humans and apes have a similar ancestor, and we branched off, remaining relatively close, but never actually joining. I site the 'evolve or die' section of survival of the fittest. If we evolved from apes, apes would have, logically, died out.

However, while I may not believe it, I understand that there are mounds of evidence suggesting that we did, in fact, evolve from apes. However, I am still not convinced. I understand why someone else would believe that, and there is no obvious flaw in logic, it is simply what I believe.

Maybe that clears things up.

lets let my degrees in anthropology come up here on this... *blows the dust away*

to be fair on that note.. neither one on that is technically wrong, depending on the language used...

apes, be them lesser, or greater apes... our hominid cousins of the past...all primates came from several branches of various marsupial animals at one point...most mammals did actually..

but the branches of where we split is far far far back... sometime around the time of Toumai ( found in chad) over 7 million years ago....while an upright primate of the hominid family, he's older than lucy " I think" closer in form to us, than a chimp.. but closest skull found to the separations that are estimated at at the latest 2 million years earlier...

however Toumai's branch " as far as we can tell" ended and is not connected to modern humans, or even our parental lines of homo gantoris.

but, on the same coin....modern apes have branches just as full of gaps, breaks and sudden line changes...

so at one point not even apes were not apes in the same way homo sapient sapient was not human

so see.. nobody is really right or wrong on that level, it's all in the wording.