Why aren't open-minded people open to Christianity?

Answer 1

Most open-minded people ARE open to the idea of Christianity; but that doesn't require that they believe in it without question. If they did believe in it without question, they would no longer be 'open-minded' because their mind would already be made up; they would not be open to new ideas.

Because they are open-minded they will be open to other ideas, and their own beliefs may be based on many different theories, faiths, etc..

Answer 2

Open-minded people are generally most open to those ideas and philosophies that have liberal (or open) interpretations and meanings. Christianity is a closed concept and leaves little room for growth or manipulation of meaning that falls outside of the "norms" set up by those in charge, meaning religious organizations not deities.

Many open-minded people have read and determined that the Bible is fiction that is, like all literature, based on an interpreting and flexing of the truth, which in this case is a truth or history like all others that will never be known or told without slants that serve the purpose of those telling the slant.

In short, open-minded people are in favor of open-minded concepts, not those that are closed.

Answer 3

I am open minded. And, I was a christian for quite some time until I was introduced to paganism. That answered a lot of questions for me that Christianity couldn't answer.
So if you are open minded, would you study paganism for 1 year? Or even Hindu if you don't want to study paganism? An open minded person would.

Answer 4

Open-minded people are open to Christianity, but being open to it does not require believing in it. Plus most Christianity that people are exposed to is hypocritical and bigoted.

Answer 5

You mean, why aren't closed minded people
open to Christianity?

Because their minds are closed. They think their
minds are open.

Answer 6

a better question would be...why aren't Christians open-minded?

Answer 7

Why put the question in the "Words and Wordplay" category?
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I don't know of any open-minded people who aren't open to Christianity as an abstract set of teachings or writings or guidelines. But I know many open-minded people who are uninterested in devotion or faith or institutionalized Christian forms of worship.

In fact, my experience is that ALL people -- Christians included -- are interested in the devotion/faith/worship practiced by at least some other group.

That is, I do not know of any Christians who are equally open to being Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, and so forth. Everyone I know draws the line somewhere. We all stop listening at some point to various people's pitches for things that don't seem to be well-supported by well-established fact and sound reasoning, or at least by compelling personal experience.


It seems to me that all Christian religions require trust and faith at some point. Many people simply don't see why they have to diminish their critical faculties, abandon their habit of careful rational scrutiny, and accept something on faith. This strikes them as a request or requirement to close themselves to something, much as an appeal to emotion does.


Speaking for myself:
With very few exceptions, I see no reason to believe an important consequential intellectual proposition unless someone can build a case for it based solely on mutually agreed-upon premises, logical reasoning, and reproducible experiment. This is the criterion used by many scientists.

Most Christian teachings and dogma are unrelated to testable hypotheses. For example, some of them deal with matters of the afterlife, or being forgiven or punished by a supernatural being who does not communicate clearly or consistently to humans. To those of us who require evidence, focusing on the unknowable and undemonstrable seems simply irrelevant.

For a person who starts with a broad and open viewpoint (for example, seeing the Bible as a culturally important work of history and literature on a par with the Bhagavad-Gita), it is difficult to narrow the viewpoint to something much smaller and closed (for example, that the Bible is the inspired word of God and has a special supernatural ability to explain, guide, and predict that is somehow different from the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Book of Mormon, or the Quran, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which all have a similar approach and tone).


To put it another way:
I am open to the idea that Odin is the king of the gods and that Thor is the creator of thunder and lightning. However, there is no evidence in support of this hypothesis that I find particularly persuasive, and there are plenty of competing explanations that seem well-supported by evidence and experiment. I therefore assign a rather low probability to the Odin/Thor hypothesis, and I don't rely on it for any predictive or explanatory power.

I am similarly open to the idea that whatever I ask in the name of Jesus will come to pass, as stated in the New Testament. However, repeated trials personally conducted by me and others have not borne this out. I therefore assign a rather low probability to the ask-Jesus hypothesis, and I don't rely on it for any predictive or explanatory power.


To put it in yet another way:
Every time you hear a statement made about God, the Bible, or Jesus, try mapping it to an equivalent assertion about , , . (Supply any book and character you like.) The quoting of a passage from , or the attribution of particular words or values to , doesn't add to or subtract from the validity of the thought expressed. This is the viewpoint of an open-minded person.

Answer 8

I'm open to it...studied it...was a christian for a few years...and decided it wasn't true.

As a Christian would you be willing to do that with anything other than Christianity?

Answer 9

Some people are scared of the truth