Here is something to think about.
Let's say you want to survey a large group of people about what they think.
You publish a magazine with, say, 1 million readers.
The name of your magazine is Adultry Fun.
You ask the Poll Question : Is Marriage Fidelity over-rated?
250,000 readers reply. 91% say "NO!" Adultry is not over-rated. 8% reply "Yes."
Now ask yourself this question.
Does this poll accurately reflect the beliefs of people in general? In only America? In the Judeo-Christian community? In the world at large?
To accurately reply you would need to understand the nature of a "FILTER".
In the above example, all the people who disbelieve Adultry is a viable way of life more than likely avoid even reading the magazine. These nay-sayers are filtered out of the poll from the start.
What about people who aren't actively interested in fringe sexual issues and who are least likely to answer sexually provocative questions? Would these people be reading Adultry Fun or responding to a sex poll? Another filtering out has taken place.
I'll stop this analogy at this point and broaden the application to include other filters.
Your local newspaper contains a built-in filter as well. What is it?
An editorial staff reviews all the news stories BEFORE deciding which ones you will read. Moreover, this editorial staff (and chiefly the Editor in Chief) will promote certain stories in a certain prominent feature presentation and bury others in the back in smaller columns. This is a bias filter.
An unwitting public may think it is merely reading the news.....unfiltered.
What about other filters?
The TV shows you don't watch, the magazines you don't buy, the music you don't listen to, the talking head's whose opinions you don't seek all constitute a FILTER against those viewpoints, ideas, ideologies and balancing presentations.
The public, by and large, automatically refuse to listen to or watch what they disagree with unless they can control the manner of presentation!
People choose their reading material to include criticisms of what they disbelieve so that the ideas they dislike will only be allowably considered after the "sting" is taken out of the viewpoint. Conservatives, for example, avoid liberal media programming in favor of conservative programming which represents the liberal viewpoint as automatically ridiculous. This is a filter.
What about scientific articles? Technology articles? Religious articles? How much filtering takes place BEFORE you even apply your own bias filter to the material you will read?
What you think you know (after a careful consideration) you may not KNOW at all! You may have selected according to an unfair process of presentation due to filtering!
Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, expect householder's to accept their Watchtower Magazine subscriptions and book offers because they view it as life giving "Truth". But, if you offer them your own religious literature to read and consider they will automatically refuse! A double standard applies because EVERYTHING in their "rational" analysis is filtered __for them__by the filter of an Organization which first interprets the essential meaning of what they think!
The "meaning" of statistics presented to a JW; the importance of news stories, the opinion of other religious groups, the accuracy of science and the trustworthiness of authority figures is distilled, filtered and deconstructed BEFORE they ever see it.
Now that you have disconnected from this filter (the Organization), how do you change your own filter without damaging the truth content??
Do you only read "certain" books and avoid others? Can you listen to viewpoints with which you now disagree without a knee-jerk response?
Have you managed to insert a filter of SKEPTICISM (seeking truth by finding proof) rather than ideology?
How often do you change your Mind Filter?