Societal Values And Natural Dispositions

A person may say they are open-minded because they grew up hearing that is how they should think.

However, they may naturally be more the type to only think what they want and block out of their minds what others say who disagree with them. 

Christians,

In trying to interpret why people act the way they do, one important consideration is the difference between ideas people superficially pick up from society and what their natural dispositions are.  In other words, a person may say they are open-minded because they grew up hearing that this is how they should think.  However, they may naturally be more the type to only think what they want and block out of their minds what others say who disagree with them.

They may have never thought too deeply about what it means to be open-minded either.  They picked up the basic meaning of it growing up.  However, they never tried very hard to incorporate it into how they think. 

What this also amounts to is the difference between how society can think and act and ideas such as being open-minded and building community.   Human beings exhibit the same dispositions today that we can read about from millennia ago because those dispositions are connected to our genetics.  That isn’t to say that people have no control over how they act, but we need to realize that the good ideas we hear today that we say we embrace can be very different from how we actually think and act.  We need to love each other just the same, but it is still important to make sense of what is going on to better respond to it and learn from it for own self-improvement as well.