Open Minded?

I see many people who demand open-mindedness. It is an interesting idea, open-mindedness. I find it is similar to the concept of "bi-partisanship" in politics. Every politician is for bi-partisanship until the other party won't do what they want them to.

Today I saw a few people post a meme where some famous folks are sharing their perspective on being open-minded. The interesting part was that being open-minded necessarily excluded a position where someone held to a religion. This bit from Jon Stewart during the election season in 2012 does a nice job illustrating (to be clear you could do this with any party, any religion, or any group of people):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pksug2a3H54

Tolerance and open-mindedness for many folks only counts if you agree with them. Christians do this all the time. We say we love people until we discover that they are one of "those" people.

Have you ever wondered what tolerance means?

tol·er·ance [tol-er-uhns] noun

1.a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry.

2. a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one's own.

3. interest in and concern for ideas, opinions, practices, etc., foreign to one's own; a liberal, undogmatic viewpoint.

4. the act or capacity of enduring; endurance: My tolerance of noise is limited.

It seems that most do not really understand what this means. The reality is that we do not practice tolerance. We only want people to agree with us. We want people to be tolerant of us, we do not want to be tolerant of other people.

Tolerance has a negative connotation. It's semantic domain includes words like: suffering, endurance, etc. It is not a positive concept. This is why we do not like to tolerate others.

I am realizing more and more that love is better than tolerance. If we will learn to love others and learn to love ourselves then we can enter into relationship with people who are different from us. Here's a little test. Ask yourself this question: Do I want someone to love me or tolerate me?

All of us would rather be loved.