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3
19
I'm not surprised Insert excuse here
Debate Score:22
Arguments:12
Total Votes:28
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 I'm not surprised (2)
 
 Insert excuse here (9)

Debate Creator

Jaywoosh(71) pic



New study says non-religious more close-minded then religious


And people say religious people are close minded?  LMAO!! XD 

I'm not surprised

Side Score: 3
VS.

Insert excuse here

Side Score: 19
1 point

This is the judgment .. that the light has come into the world ..

and men loved the darkness rather than the light .. for their deeds were evil ..... John 03:19

http://dadmansabode.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3160#p3160

Side: I'm not surprised
0 points

You have to look no further than the walls of our publicly funded Colleges.

We have Liberal Professors making paintings of Trump's severed head, and the public funded Colleges are displaying this hate art on their walls for all the impressionable students to see.

This is the closed minded intolerant Left spewing pure hatred towards those who do not think like them.

Any thinking person can simply watch the biased media and see the intolerance and closed mindedness of the Left.

Side: I'm not surprised
Mack(531) Disputed
1 point

That doesn't really link to the debate topic, it's just a dig at liberals. I do agree with some of your points though.

Side: Insert excuse here
FromWithin(8241) Clarified
0 points

It's not a dig at Liberals. It's giving facts to show the intolerant closed minds of Liberals.

Since when does giving facts about Liberals mean we are making digs at Liberals?

If displaying the severed head of our President on our public funded College walls does not bother you, and you think it is making a dig to bring it up, then WOW!

I guess the Democrat Party and the Liberal media are digging a Grand Canyon with no evidence against trump.

Side: I'm not surprised
3 points

I didn't pay for the full study as you apparently have to, but from reading the link in the debate description I can already see a lot of problems with this study. (Make sure you read that link so you know what I'm talking about)

We'll start with self-selection bias, as the survey was done online and people would therefore be able to decide whether to participate in the survey or not. This limits the types of participants to people who were interested in taking the survey, and is problematic for the validity of the results. It is not random enough, and all results are rendered somewhat unreliable right off the bat. Also, with an online study there is plenty of room for piss-takers, and people who want to make their group look good.

Now for the methods they used to measure close-mindedness:

The first one (one the Christians scored highly for close mindedness on) seems a decent way to measure close-mindedness, but is still not very black and white, they're just asking people for their opinions, rather than asking them to make an effort to understand a new idea, which is the only way to measure close-mindedness.

The second form of measurement, "intolerance of contradictions," doesn't make much sense. Surely contradicting statements shouldn't be tolerated? It is only logical to note that two statements are contradicting.

The third measure showed some promise, but it would be so hard to measure in an online survey that I can't imagine the results are meaningful, after all, how would you measure someone's ability to imagine new ideas in an online survey. Also the propensity to find contrary arguments somewhat convincing, seems an odd way to measure it - what if the arguments simply weren't convincing?

Another method was to measure certainty in one's beliefs, which could easily be done on a one to ten scale or something like that online, and seems the most reliable method yet. Interestingly, this part showed religious to be more close-minded.

The integrating contrary views part seems odd and vague. I'm not sure what they mean, or how they would measure this so I'll withhold judgement.

To nitpick a little more, the small sample sizes of Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews leaves plenty of room for sampling variation within their groups. All results measured for those three groups, and the "other" group are therefore unreliable, and should be binned. Only atheist, agnostic, and Christian samples are large enough.

Even if this investigation's results were to be taken seriously, and that's a pretty big if, the final conclusion is that both religious and non-religious groups are close-minded in different areas, contrary to what the debate's title ("New study says non-religious more close-minded then religious") suggests.

Btw, the person who wrote the article that was in the link did acknowledge that the findings could be flawed, so I'm not making a dig at them, just at people who instantly believed these findings proved anything.

Finally, to point out some hypocrisy from the debate creator, the title of the debate side ("Insert excuse here") which my argument is on seems quite condescending, and suggests that whatever we say is going to be a cheap excuse, which to me seems quite close-minded. Just saying.

Side: Insert excuse here
3 points

Your source is complete bunk. As others have pointed out, it links to an article which arbitrarily interprets another study rather than linking to the study directly. Furthermore, from reading the first two paragraphs it is clear that "religious" people have been compared to atheists, rather than people who are simply not religious. Atheism is the active belief that there is no God, which is every bit as much a faith-based claim as the belief that there is a God. Effectively, one religious group is being compared to another.

Side: Insert excuse here
2 points

The study was done using three countries and you have only printed a small piece of it one must pay for the full study ,so did you pay for and read the full study ?

So religious people are more open minded ?

1 . 2 billion Muslims claim to be religious people so are they more open minded and if so how ?

Atheists are united on only one thing and that's the question regarding a god so how was their close mindedness evaluated by these 'experts '?

Taking America as an example 93 per cent of scientists accept Evolution as fact why do the followers of American religions in large numbers deny what's fact ?

Thanks for the laugh 👌

Side: Insert excuse here
2 points

Firstly, your phrasing is incorrect. It should be "New study finds non-religious CAN be more close-minded than religious". You've already indicated a bias here.

Secondly, I'm sure we're all getting sick of the biased titles for the "sides" you can take in debates like these. Don't push your own views onto everyone else in the format of your debate; rise up and actually defend your position.

This study was conducted in Western Europe. Are you aware of how religious people who claim to be religious are in Western Europe?

The answer is that the vast majority of religious people are not very strongly religious compared to the fervour that comes out of the USA. A lot of religious people in Western Europe tend also to be freethinkers and a LOT quieter about their faith in comparison to Americans.

In the UK, for example, there is something of a cultural taboo about publicly discussing religion; whilst the new American-influenced Evangelical churches tend to shout religion from the rooftops, the traditional Anglican faith is much quieter and more reserved.

"Dawkins atheists" are a very small proportion of atheists.

This is also a very small-scale study with just 788 participants across three different countries. Hardly representative of the population of any of these countries.

Side: Insert excuse here
1 point

There's a logical reason for this.

Religious dogma is bullshit. It's anti-scientific; anti-progress; puerile make-believe. If an intelligent scientist rejects fanciful notions, you might conclude he is closed minded and that he has a my-side bias. Yes, but he has a my-side bias because what he knows is based on fact, not superstition. He rejects superstition, and rightly so.

The study shows clearly that religious people are far more DOGMATIC than the unreligious (meaning holding fervent belief in something without factual evidence), while atheists are far more unbecoming towards arguments that stand in contradiction to their factual analyses of the world.

That's closed-mindedness in the same way that seeing the geological strata and then refusing to believe the Earth is 6000 years old, is closed-mindedness. I am completely opposed to the idea that there are a spaghetti monster, a tooth fairy and a Santa Claus. I study evidence of evolution all the time and so the notion of an ark and a big scary creator god and a young Earth are utterly ridiculous: I know they contradict fact. Call it closed-minded all you want. It's a logical, factual position.

Atheists are poor at assimilating the views of hordes of idiots who have a shared belief in idiotic ideas, who share cultural hysteria, and who make wild claims with no evidence. Who would've guessed it?

Tell us something we don't know already.

Side: Insert excuse here
1 point

Actually, the text of the article you posted says the religious do score higher in "dogma" whereas the non-religious score higher in refusal to accept "contradiction". I'm willing to grant indeed the latter is a form of closed mindedness, and depending on the level of resistance could be worse, but it's not simply a blanket declaration that non-religious are more close-minded period. It's not letting the religious off the hook.

Furthermore, it's a study by Catholic University. Not exactly unbiased. And they surveyed 788 people in UK, France, and Spain. That's not a worldwide basis for drawing conclusions.

Side: Insert excuse here
1 point

As far as I can tell, the article appears to state that the religious are more close-minded than the non-religious in terms of dogmatism, whereas the non-religious are more close-minded than the religious in terms of tolerating things which seem to contradict other statements which they know, or believe, to be true. To say that this means that the non-religious are always more close-minded than the religious, as opposed to it simply meaning that pigheadedness and stubbornness can be found on both sides, seems to be at best a dishonest simplification and at worse an outright failure to actually understand the article or the study.

And besides which, "open-mindedness" can only be taken so far: I am vaguely reminded of some corny line about not opening your mind too far in case your brains fall out. When it comes to statements which are proposed without any evidence, and which blatantly contradict observed facts and simple common sense, open-mindedness probably isn't actually the best policy.

Side: Insert excuse here