Open mindedness

You'll often hear people talking about how open minded they are. They really consider this a virtue. It's important to point out that to them, being "open minded" is an ethical imperative.

I don't think that this distinction between "open minded" and "closed minded" is sensible. Everyone has some framework in terms of which you evaluate your beliefs to determine whether or not they fit within your framework. What's important is not how "open minded" or "closed minded" that framework is (for whatever the terms "open minded" and "closed minded" happen to mean at the moment), but whether that framework is self-consistent and whether your beliefs are true.

People who criticize others for not being open minded enough should be challenged to substantiate what their criticism means. They think the criticism of being closed minded carries ethical weight. In other words, they're insisting that you accept some ethical position. Ask the person who is admonishing what standard of ethics they hold that makes sense of their ethical position and gives them authority to tell you how to believe. In addition, they undermine themselves, for their practice of telling you how to believe is itself not open minded or tolerant of other belief systems than their own.

Christians are often accused of being "closed minded". I think that Christians should correct people who claim that we're closed-minded by pointing out that we attempt to be "God minded". We should be tolerant of what God is tolerant of, we should hate passionately what God hates, and we should love passionately what God loves.

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23:47 (utc-4)