: Point a finger and you'll get three back at you.
Good point, but I really am open to all viewpoints except closed-mindedness. This is why I hate religious fundamentalism - fundamentalism by its nature requires the individual to suspend logic and openness to alternatives and instead take everything on faith. If you experess any doubt, you are blasphemous - your are defiling the faith. You are turning your back on the truth!
I'm not trying to change who you are, Goran, nor would I want to. Trying to convince others to consider or accept alternative points of view has nothing to do with changing who they are. It has everything to do with learning and personal growth. Indeed, democracy cannot exist unless you are willing to listen to alternative viewpoints. If you are convinced that your viewpoint is the only one, you cannot effectively listen to different candidates and choose the one whose philosophy is most consistent with your own. Unfortunately, a lot of voters fail in this regard - they vote strictly based on party affiliation or because of one or two issues about which they feel strongly, without regard to the individual.
This is well before your time, but I remember a congressman who represented a district adjacent to my own. During the Watergate scandal back when I was a kid, this congressman actually said, "Don't confuse me with the facts. Richard Nixon is a great president." As you probably know, Nixon resigned, and this congressman was voted out of office during the next election. The bottom line is that although he was convinced he was right, he was in fact very wrong and he paid for it with his job.
If you want to ignor the opinions, beliefs and advice of those around you, that is your absolute right, Goran. I respect your philosophy and although I disagree with it vehimently, I will not challenge it any more than I am doing here. The one thing of which I'm fairly certain is that your viewpoint will have changed dramatically by the time you reach my age. If not, you will likely be in a dead-end job, in jail or dead. I'm not trying to scare you - I doubt that I could - but I deal with people with serious injuries, many of them the victims of drunk drivers, risk-taking or gun violence. Case in point - a young man watched another dive into a river, break his neck and end up being lifted out by helicopter. He was one of many who watched this whole sad ordeal. Later that day, he did exactly the same thing and ended up spending his life in a wheelchair, unable to use his hands or legs. You may call this obvious stupidity, which it certainly was, but it was as much a reflection of the young man's refusal to question. It's like my stroke patients who think that they just had some bad luck, rather than that they didn't listen to their doctors who warned them about their blood pressure being to high. Or the lung cancer victims who continued to smoke in spite of all the information out there on smoking and cancer. Was it their right to ignore the data and do what they want with their lives? Perhaps, but they aren't the only ones who pay a price for their mistakes - we all pay a price.
Goran, I am definitley not trying to change who you are. I'm just suggesting the radical possibility that what you perceive of as other people trying to change you may actually be nothing more than opinions that at their worst are harmless and that have the potential to enrich your life. Maybe 90% of what people tell you is worthless, but it's also possible that 90% of what you believe is flat out wrong. A scary thought, I know, but everyone can't be right at the same time. Since you're fond of the analogy, look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself that you are 100% certain that everything you believe in is completely right - so much so that you would be willing to risk your life and the lives of everyone you care about, based on your perceptions of the world. If you can do this, there is a nice little section in the DSM IV about you. If on the other hand if you do acknowledge a small amount of self-doubt, all I'm suggesting - and it's only a suggestion - is that it's worth listening to what others have to say.
