A friend of mine and I were having a discussion the other day. It started out innocently enough, but he had to push his point. He was talking about a drive-in theater and it came up that I had never been to one. I guess he could tell that I had something against them and he asked me about it. I told him I never, ever want to go to one. His argument was simply that I couldn't know if I liked it or not unless I had been to one. We went round and round as I tried to explain that a drive-in theater would spoil the movie for me, streetlights and stray car headlights, outside noises and even being in a car to watch the movie would all distract me and ruin the experience. That is probably because I love to watch movies and I do not go simply to hang out with friends and have a good time. In fact, I prefer to go to the theater alone. I didn't tell him all my reasons, I merely wanted to convey the fact that I know darn well what I like and don't like and I don't need anyone to tell me that I can't know and that I don't know myself well enough to make those judgments.
I definitely agree that new experiences can open your eyes to things you never knew, about the world and yourself, and we cannot let emotional assumptions based on zero knowledge keep us from new experiences. I love airplanes, but I used to hate helicopters because they "didn't fly right." They take off vertically and do not smoothly glide through the air. They're much louder and they're naturally unstable aircraft. They just didn't "feel right" to me. Well, my brother offered to pay for a helicopter ride for me if I wanted to go, because he wanted me to experience it for myself. He wanted to open my eyes to the fact that I had made a judgment, about an aspect of aviation, that was totally wrong. I decided to go, and I loved it. In many ways, it is much better than flying in an airplane. The experience is amazing, we took off and went straight over the treetops and suddenly we were hanging over the freeway. I thought we were hovering but I looked at the airspeed indicator and saw that we were doing seventy!
The reason I was wrong though, was because I had no real reasons for disliking helicopters except that they didn't "feel" right. Now I make my judgments based on experience and reason, not feelings. Feelings can be a help, but it's the mind that is most useful in the end.
I know that bringing up politics and my very overt opinions next will rankle many readers, but it is completely essential to convey the idea of using your brain to make informed decisions. Hopefully, the message will get across. Because I make judgments based upon past experience and reason, I never saw Fahrenheit 9-11. I could tell from the information about the movie and from the short clips used to promote it, that it was overtly biased to the point of presenting information in an untruthful manner. That has turned out to be true. I don't need to get in the garbage can to prove to everyone that I was right in judging the garbage can to be full of garbage. It looks like a garbage can, it smells like garbage and I can see garbage inside it. I don't need to inspect every piece to prove it. The same principle applies to the movie. Do I need to watch every clip in order to understand how to argue against it? No way. If I am armed with the truth, I can just as easily argue my point about any claim made in the movie whether I have seen it or not. Because, it's about facts. Michael Moore tried to present us with his views, (which, incidentally, I don't think he really believes in himself, but is using them to fleece liberals out of their money), and all he did was educate the liberal camp, reinforcing their ideas about the world, and influencing ignorant moderates and conservatives. The unfortunate thing is that media influences people without needing credibility because the idea that credibility is inherent in media, has been passed down from the generation that could trust what they saw on television. That was the age before the kind of explotation we are bombarded with today. Media is merely a tool, like a microphone, albeit a very complex one, that is used by people. And people who are outspoken and insistent can have a big effect on open minded people who have not taken the time or effort to research the facts on their own.
Most people are by nature, followers. So it is a good thing when a great preacher comes along with sound reasoning and a deep knowledge of the Bible, leading people to become better Christians, challenging them to act on their faith instead of merely sitting in the pews on Sunday and challenging them to grow spiritually and as human beings. But so many people these days follow money hungry televangelists who make them feel good about themselves and promise money that outweighs their faith ten-fold. People are not seeking the truth but the comfort of what "feels right". This is why we see so many people packing the auditoriums of mega churches that guilt their members into giving more money than they can afford to give. And this why so many people watch and fall for so called "documentaries" like Michael Moore's "9-11" and Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," which is riddled with inconvenient untruths.
It is good to be rounded out, but it is ridiculous to open yourself up to everything without prejudgment. We should be wary and cautious with all new information unless we know its source. And in many cases it is okay to say that you will not open your mind to a new thing if you have good reasons not to do so. Walking the path between ignorance and caution is a difficult one, but if we wish to truly know ourselves and be discriminating people, then we have to maintain that balance so that we are not simply washed away by the flood of unsubstantiated information propagated by our friends, family and our enemies.