A closed mind?

I'm pretty sure you all have seen, at one point, things like this post. While I think it's a nice example of free speech, I don't think the writter understand the issues at all. Comments like this one gives a clue as to why: "And I would never go to Europe. What is there to see?"...

If you check the terms and conditions at the bottoms, you can read:

The web site is designed to be funny. We hope it made some of you laugh.

I won't give my opinion on the topics, but the fact that the (fictional) writter doesn't want to face the rest of the world, reminds me of some coworkers I had who didn't want to discuss the reasons why they beleived in some political party: because it was, to them, the only truth.

Well, if it was the absolute truth, why didn't everybody embrase it yet?

A closed mind is the worse thing anyone can have. The strength of one ideals of faith is not mesure by your devotion, or the number of things you do: it is mesured by going deep into hell and coming back unscared, by facing the demons themselves and comming back victorious. And I'm not speaking about a test of might, but more of a test of ideas. If your faith is perfect, and you know that you have the absolute truth, why are you afraid to test it? If you never tryied anything else, if you never been anywhere, if you never did anything, how can you be sure that your choises are the best ones? If truth was as crystal clear, why is there someone else to oppose you?

I talked about the fact that history repeats itself, and this is a classic example of the Allegory of the Cave, a concept describe by Plato in 'The republic', some 2000 years ago. In his exemple, a group of people was living inside a cave, and had never seen the outside. A single individual was taken from this group, and shown the outside: the sun, the plants, the trees, etc... But if he could never go back to the cave, not after seeing the outside world, and if he did, the individuals inside would simply never believe him. They would probably exile him because he is now an excentric in their eyes. But we all know he is not... Since people don't like to change and don't like to be wrong, they can sometime do very unlogical things, and not see that they are wrong...

Admiting that you might be wrong is, for some, the single most hardest thing they could ever do. That is why we have so many religion, so many political party, etc. because we hate to admit that we might be wrong, and prefer to stick to our ideas even if they are wrong.

Your house stays up because the ideas behind it, the works of the engineers that approved it, was tested over and over again, until they knew why this part or this part was wrong. Houses, bridges and the likes don't fall anymore because we have been perfecting the engineering expertise behind them from before ancient Roman times.

Brigdes occassional fall (Tacoma narrow bridge come to mind), and ideas are sometimes wrong, but if we don't want to change and to learn, we will never know what was wrong...