There is a big difference in being "close-minded" and simply having an "educated opinion" on an issue. To be close-minded means that one refuses to listen to a differing view on a subject, is not interested at all in seeing the other side, and no matter what the evidence to the contrary presented is, stalwartly hangs onto their belief.
On the other hand, I pride myself in being a person who takes advantage of an almost limitless amount of information available today via the internet (google and other search engines) and other media, on all sides of an issue. Having the luxury of time, I spend hours and sometimes days, researching a lot of differing viewpoints filtering out the credible from the unreliable sources. That method, coupled with my extensive 61 years of life experiences, having been exposed to all sorts of people and lifestyles, not having been raised in an insular enviornment, traveling extensively throughout the world for weeks at a time in, sometimes, totally alien enviornments, having been in both a fundamentalist church in my childhood, and totally immersed in a free thinking "anything goes" college enviornment in the radical sixties, I believe I have emerged as a "free agent" with the requisite amount of wisdom garnerd from the afore mentioned experiences.
I've witnessed the "fruits" of the people I know my age and older and have seen what works and hasn't worked in their lives. All of this information has been processed in a way that is hardly "close-minded", but has merely enabled me to become a "casual observer" of life who has, hopefully, benefitted from what I have learned along the way.
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