I don't care what people say. Being for one cause or another does NOT make you open-minded. No, that is something that is separate from any issue. The problem is, narrow-mindedness is not a plague forced on us by religious bigots or fundamentalist conservatives. It is a human condition. The moment someone believes in one issue, the moment there is pronounced disagreement, there is narrow-mindedness. Because people are stubborn. They are selfish and proud, and they allow that pride to become stupidity. Suddenly you have hatred in the name of righteousness and bigotry in the name of an open mind.
So we need to stop pretending like there's a side that is more open-minded than the other. Just take a look around you. Bigotry is everywhere, and it's not just in the places you'd like to find it. It's in every aspect of our proud human lives.
3 comments:
One thing to consider is this: as Christians, narrow-mindedness is a given if one is of the belief that Jesus is THE only way to Heaven (as I am).
Furthermore, I have to strike a balance between being set in my ways yet accepting of others who might have differing beliefs. After all, in Matthew 28:19 Jesus says "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations". We can teach all we want, but that doesn't guarantee that people will actually listen to us. Still, that doesn't give us a right to go we therefore and shove the Gospel down the throats of all nations.
In a sense, missionaries don't make the conversions; they just advertise. It's up to the missionaries to let their Maker finish the job how He decides, and to let the recipients of that information to make the choice of conversion on their own.
The Age of Exploration didn't have that mindset, because a papal decree allowed the Portuguese (and subsequent other nations who jumped on the conquest bandwagon) to go out and enslave the heathens. By their logic, their lifetime on Earth in slavery wouldn't be so bad, provided they had seats reserved in Heaven. Unfortunately it's a time period which we regard with ambivalence—if things didn't go as they did, none of us would be where we are today. At the same time, it was an era of atrocities and racism—born from the bigotry you mentioned in this post (also, Portugal was a rather poor nation at the time, so the "let's get rich" idea sounded great too).
Well spoken. You should post that on your blog.
Done.
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