Your Closed Minded!

Okay, admittedly I've never thought about owning a "closed minded", much less what I'd do with one. Ha! :)

But okay, possessive wrongly used for contraction aside, when you call your interlocutor close-minded for merely disagreeing with you, this amounts to an ad hominem fallacy. Yes, because you are essentially suggesting that if I don't agree with your worldview then, oh, my mind must be closed.

Alrighty, let's see how this mindset stacks up if applied elsewhere:

Suppose that a Christian and a Muslim are in a debate and the topic of the debate is which faith's holy writ is truly inspired by a supernatural entity, and which faith's holy writ is a bunch of man-made nonsense.

Okay, so in closing arguments the Muslim tells the guy representing the Christian faith that he is "close-minded" because he was ultimately not swayed by the Muslim's arguments that the Holy Qu'ran is in fact the divinely inspired Will and Testament of the creator of the universe, not the bible.

Question: Will the Christian debater accept the Muslim's charge that he is close-minded? And what about any Christians in the audience? Will they accept that they, too, are close-minded, and all because they remain unconvinced that the Qu'ran holds the power that the Muslim debater and the Qu'ran itself, say it holds?

The answer on both counts of course is NO. The Christian debater is simply not convinced of the claims of Islam or its book, and dollars to doughnuts the same would be true for any Christians in the audience.

So now let's switch it up for a moment: Suppose that the Christian debater was instead an atheist, and suppose that the Muslim made the same charge in his closing arguments, telling the audience, "Atheists reject the Qu'ran, so we must therefore conclude that atheists are close-minded!".

Now, would the Christians in the audience agree with the Muslim debater that the atheist debater is "close-minded" for rejecting the claims of Islam and its accompanying book? If we're honest, we must admit that the answer to that question is "no", because if we can conclude that atheists are "close-minded" and thus write them off for rejecting the Qu'ran, then by extension we ought to be able to conclude that Christians are also "close-minded" for rejecting the Qu'ran. Needless to say, Christians don't like being written-off any more than anyone else likes being written-off.

So, see, when Christians reject the claims of other theists, it's not because Christians are necessarily close-minded; it's because Christians are skeptics just like atheists are skeptics. The difference is that Christians don't apply that same skepticism to their own theistic claims, whereas, atheists apply skepticism to all theistic claims.

In other words, when internet Christians trot out the argument that nonbelievers are "close-minded" for not accepting their bible, this is just another in a long line of intellectual cop-outs. It's also no coincidence that this is nine times out of ten employed as a parting shot, when nothing else in their ministry has worked.