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