“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Aristotle.
I must not have a very educated mind then... sometimes I worry that if I think about something too much, or look too much into someone else's viewpoint too closely, I might fall into it. It's ok if they're talking about chocolate vs strawberry flavored ice-cream.
But what about when a person is directly attacking church doctrine to which I hold so dearly?
If I listened too much, could I fall away from my convictions?
John Stuart Mill (among others) said that truth would come out victorious no matter what people say, so we should let every voice be heard in a great market of ideas.
But are there some voices that are too destructive? Do we sometimes have to block out something that could damage our viewpoint, or is that because we secretly fear we're wrong? There are some things I don't think I could ever bear to be false
People can be very convincing. Even listening to two sides of an argument between students at school, it's easy to see where each student is coming from and hard to discern who was in the right and who was in the wrong.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point, although I don't worry about you falling away. You just need to make sure that you hear things from all sides (sides that are worth listening to) and stick to what you know is true. Human reason can't justify God, so don't try.