The Importance of Being Open-Minded

Drolgerg and Penelope vs David and Goliath

Yesterday on twitter I RTd a tweet about judge Cherie Booth (Mrs Tony Blair)'s idiocy in letting off a guy who was convicted of a serious assault on the utterly fallacious assumption that because he was religious he was therefore more moral than the rest of us. Bigotry, favouritism & cronyism of the worst order, & actually pretty typical of Blair's Labour regime.

This is the tweet: RT: Do religious people really not get why atheists are starting to shout, when this CRAP comes out? http://bit.ly/btuGLU. Nothing too extreme, right?

A twitter user called @DavidAndGoliath, who calls himself Christian, took issue with it.

After tweeting back & forth - during which time he was abusive & offensive, & I tried to be as calm & logical as I could – he’d argued himself into a corner.

At that point I asked him point blank: what is it exactly that you object to about my tweet? His response? Nothing. I eventually gave up.

He then deleted all his tweets on the subject.* I thought all this was pretty cowardly & dishonest. After having a go at me, abusively, when he was proved wrong - or at least had had reasonable doubt made on his argument - he wouldn't back down or apologise. Instead he cut & ran then shredded the evidence, so he could pretend nothing had happened & carry on in his self-imposed delusions.

He seemed unable / unwilling to see the point we were making, & seemed determined to read a lot into it that was never there.

This, to me, illustrates a great divider in humanity: the open-minded & rational vs narrow-minded bigotry.

When proved wrong an open-minded & rational person will acknowledge that they may be wrong, even if it means examining values that they hold dear, even ones by which they may define their existence.

The closed-minded person is unable or unwilling to do this, & will do what this guy did: run away from anything uncomfortable & bury their head in the sand.

And by the way I don’t mean this only of religious people; it can be true of anyone: zealot, atheist & any shade inbetween.

If we were all able to question even our most cherished opinions when circumstances or reason suggests it our world might be a much happier place.

* I kept copies

Operation Knock Down Door

My big brother George & I don't like the neighbours over the road, so we've decided to invade their house.

I don't like the way they treat their children, but also they have a nice car which I'd quite like. Also, if I don't George will stop feeding me the neighbourhood gossip I need, & he says I can get income from sub-contracting out repairing the damage afterwards. He's Smart.

It may be unpopular & illegal, but it's The Right Thing To Do. Plus the voice of God is telling me to do it, although I'm going to keep quiet about that until afterwards when the heat has died down & I've moved away.

On a totally unrelated note, Tony Blair gave evidence to the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry today didn't he?