[>BKA< T Wrecks]

@ MarD: I was referring to those "hardcore" Christians.

@ Exilibur: Interesting question, but I don't think it's a problem. Look, they don't need to be open-minded, and even if it were necessary, there would be no way to force them to be liberal. With more fundamentalist or fanatic people, there is not even a way to get them to see reality... they live in their own world and their own reality.

Take an example: In the USA, there's a certain (and not unimportant!) group of Christians who call themselves (or get called) "creationalists". Those are people who believe word by word what's in the bible. Evolution? Darwin? Physical or biological laws? Forget it. For them it's all in the bible. In some areas, schools no longer teach the creation of the world and its development according to widely accepted scientific facts - they teach the creation of the world etc. as written in the bible!

Some of these creationalists have even built a replica of Noah's ark according to the most exact dimensions they could extract from the biblical writings, and they believe that Noah took a pair of each species onto his Ark and thus preserved life.

You cannot get such a person to become open-minded. You can't even reason, discuss or argument with them; it's pointless. Say that the Ark wasn't big enough to hold animals of all species, let alone keep them away from each other so that the lions don't end up eating the zebras - such people will swear it was. Prove them wrong, and they will say that many animals have been transported as eggs or babies. Prove them wrong again, and they will shrug and say something like God has accomplished it somehow and it's not up to us humans bla bla bla.

Ask them why they don't believe that the stars are hung up in the sky and dangle down towards a flat earth. Ask them what they think where the space shuttles went and why the Earth looks so suspiciously spherical from space... you could beat them up and still wouldn't get them to accept anything. They are beyond any argumentation, you don't reach them.

So I guess it's absolutely impossible to force people to be open-minded.

The good news is that they don't need to be forced into more liberal thinking. All it takes is to prevent them from forcing others under their rule, and keep them out of public institutions. If they want to live in their world, fine. You could say that this is what we all do in one way or another. For them, liberal people live in a world of make belief and shut their eyes in front of the godly truth or whatever. All it takes is an earthly government that will keep groups with conflicting opinions from attacking each other. It's not required to achieve something by force that cannot be achieved by any force in this world. If they think that it's against God's will to have sex for any other purpose than reproduction, and that only married couples may have sex at all, no problem. It's their good right to believe that, and if I say I am for democracy, I say that I'm for their right to believe that, whether I like it or not. If they have children and teach them all that stuff, it starts to become problematic, however, because the poor children cannot choose and are too young to judge by themselves... but in the end I think we have to accept it. The limit is wherever they want to carry their opinion over into public institutions (= everything which doesn't belong to their church or their private life) such as "normal" schools etc... a government must take measures to prevent that.

I think that's a compromise both sides can live with (although they might not like it), but also one that's beneficial for all sides in the long run and most of all - possible.

Another interesting question, though: What makes people become like this? Is it the natural way people think, and have more liberal people moved away from the norm? Or is a more open-minded attitude the norm, and have those fundamentalists moved away from this norm? And if so, why?