Is it normal to think religions are close-minded?

like several people said, it depends on the individual. i think people that are easily lead and close-minded would still be that way even without religion. they would find something else to follow blindly. some people are more succeptible to propaganda than others. it's because some people have conventional morality, others have post-conventional morality. some people probably won't ever be smart enough to make their own choices. this could be because of their brain or because they have yet to have experiences that open their minds to possibilities.

The one thing I would like to ask since your christian is why do you need a reason to be a good person? I'm not going to give up my bus seat to an elderly woman because it's what god would want; I'd give up my bus seat to an elderly woman because it's the right fucking thing to do.

I'd like to think that if Christianity didn't exist than all the Christian people would still want to do the right thing but looking at the way they're so quick to judge non-Christians as lost because we don't share their exact beliefs; I just really don't know if that's true for a lot of them. It just seems like we should be celebrating love, friendships and family over some god who we just sort of owe everything too.

This isn't an attack on you. In fact you seem really level headed which is why I'd like your opinion on it. As an outside observer it just seems like a really weird way to live to me. I guess I just don't really understand religion. Why does there need to be a greater meaning to life. Life is fucking beautiful.

Im a Christian and im pretty open minded and im actually not sure if it would be right to call Atheism a religion since a religion always seem to have a god or well buddha isnt but still...

Thinking about this analytically, we are discussing two separate things but the issue is being clouded because we're treating them as one thing.

Thing A: What a person's beliefs are
Thing B: How open-minded they are

I think a lot of people will say that thing A influences thing B; that if someone is religious, it makes them closed-minded. The reason they say this is because we all know religious people who are closed-minded. However, that's an observation, not a proof.

The only proof here is that thing B is thing B (logically, it can't be anything but true). To put that into English, people are closed-minded because they are closed-minded, not because they are religious.

Some may argue in the other direction: that people are religious because they are closed-minded. But because the logic above works in both directions, there's no proof there either.

Personally, I think people call others closed-minded when they believe something different. That's not closed-minded. It's differently-minded.

Believing in a god or gods makes you close minded period.