My views haven’t changed too much over the decades. I assumed most of the Bible was mythical from a very early age.(*) I’ve always been a social liberal, but (years before joining SDMB) switched from right-of-center to left-of-center on economic and foreign policy issues. That switch came from educating myself through reading and listening to intelligent people. (Although I’ve been intellectually curious and an avid reader all my life, public policy was of low interest to me until mid-life.)
One topic where SDMB has changed my opinion somewhat is computer programming! I once thought that anyone preferring “modern” languages like C++ or Python over vanilla C was mentally defective. Now I’ll accept that my preference for C may be an aberration of my idiot-savant cognition. (Nevermind whether it’s the idiot or savant part that likes C. )
Is it hypocritical that I was an acolyte when very young? No one asked me if I wanted to be an acolyte, and I was much too shy and timid to tell our vicar or my father that I didn’t believe in the Christian God. :smack:
Probably the biggest shift has been leaving the false comfort of my lukewarm Christianity. I credit the SDMB to this, but I think it was inevitable given my skeptical nature.
But my agnostic stance isn’t limited to just religion/God, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to appreciate this about myself. I am perfectly comfortable withholding judgment on a variety of controversial topics. Just because I lean one way politically doesn’t mean I need to have my mind completely made up on every liberal cause. So while my politics haven’t changed much, I have become a lot less opinionated and cock-sure about my beliefs. I think the SDMB can be credited with this as well.
I somewhat remember my beliefs when I graduated high school, more than 50 years ago. But I can’t even remember how many times I’ve changed my mind over the years, on a broad assortment of beliefs, philosophical or frivolous . . . sometimes 180 degrees, or even 360.
Waterboarding. I believed it worked since an old friend of mine, a former Marine, “playfully” exposed me to it back in the 80’s. It sure worked on me, but it wasn’t a matter of life and death. After reading enough research into the effectiveness of it, I gradually came to see it as a not-very-useful (but not entirely UNuseful) method. On balance, I think it’s not effective enough to warrant widespread or “casual” use.
Belief that the majority of terrorism in the world is conducted by Muslim extremists. I actually took the time, after being challenged continuously on a site not unlike this one, to research official reports of all terrorist activity around the globe for a specific year (I think it was 2011, possibly 2010) and discovered that although Muslim terrorism was the largest percentage (something like 48% I think) worldwide, it wasn’t the majority, as in more than 50%. So I stood corrected. I even posted a summary of my findings. I haven’t bothered looking into it since then, but I doubt the overall percentage has changed much.
Thanks! I wasn’t following the flock when I was a Republican at Rutgers University either… maybe veering from the flock my consistent (then again, being a Christian in the South US is nothing strange, but being a Progressive Postmodern Liturgical Christian may be ;)).
I do think there was a study a some point that showed that folks that read their Bible tended to be more left leaning than those that didn’t (I assume from similar starting positions) - so I wonder why more people haven’t had my story.
The SDMB actually caused me to take a 180 on a lot of my beliefs. From 2001 to about 2005 I was a huge conspiracy theorist.
It started with 9/11. Back in those days I spent a lot of time on paranormal themed message boards. The main one I hung out on had a conspiracy section, and it lit up like a Christmas tree after that day.
I read every thread on 9/11 that got posted. Dissenting voices were few and far between on there, and they didn’t really post much in the way of evidence that it wasn’t a conspiracy.
Eventually that board shut down, and I started googling for more 9/11 threads on messageboards. It led to me to SDMB. As I started reading the threads here, and the links that kept getting posted, I started looking at events differently. It eventually led to me admitting 9/11 wasn’t a huge government plot like I once thought.
I’ve changed my mind on quite a few topics over the years. I used to be a militant atheist and politically I was extremely left-wing–I voted for Nader in 2000. In both of those I was following in the footsteps of my parents and my paternal grandparents. When I was young our house was filled with copies of The Nation and other reading of that sort, so I was mostly exposed to writings that reflected my own viewpoints. On the rare occasion when I encountered something with a different viewpoint, usually emotions took over and I dismissed it without thought.
I went to college and, at first, remained wrapped inside the left-wing bubble. As the years went on, though, I started noticing a lot of odd and unpleasant behavior from fellow left-wingers and atheists, particularly among the professors, and thus began questioning that the people who agreed with me were all so rational and superior to the rest of the human race, as I’d presumably assumed. And gradually I came into contact with people from outside the bubble and began reading books and magazines from libertarian and conservative viewpoints, and the more I read, the more logical and solidly grounded their arguments seemed to be, especially when compared to the howling from the far left.
Did the Straight Dope Message Board help? In some ways I suppose, mainly by providing links to outside sources. I think I first saw a link to Reason magazine’s website here and started reading it mainly to gawk and be outraged by their libertarian views. Over time, I gradually shifted to agreeing with most, though not all, of what they said. In the main, I find that message board posts are usually too short to make much of an impact on a person’s deeply held views.
Used to be a Rush Limbaugh-conservative. Reading libertarian stuff cured me of that. Then spent some time as a real Ayn Rand-type libertarian, but after reading Alan Watts I couldn’t take that seriously anymore, and tossed Atlas Shrugged aside halfway through. There’s no necessary connection between the two, but what Watts wrote about rang true, and in that light it was impossible not to chuckle at Rand – I don’t know.
Moving away from staunch conservatism was also helped by the realization that, in another time and place, I would surely be the guy rationalizing slavery, or Jim Crow. That didn’t sit well.
I used to be a creationist. An examination of the evidence changed my mind. I also was formerly anti-abortion, but there is a passage in Exodus that talks about an unborn fetus as not a life, so I became pro-choice.
Apart from those issues, I am somewhat further to the right than I used to be. Mostly this is from being awake during the 1980s and 90s. Socialism/communism/protectionism don’t work - it is as simple as that. Free markets and free trade do.
It has not been my experience that any part of the political spectrum is better at changing its mind than any other.
Your conversion is no less remarkable than that of Saint Paul.
As for myself, I have changed my mind about the Afghanistan war. At the time I was all for going after the Taliban who aided and abetted bin Laden. Now I think it was a big mistake and we’d be infinitely better off just lobbing a few missiles every now and then at terrorist training camps. What changed my mind? The reallization that we were spending a fortune to build a government and infrastructure in a land that is ungovernable. The rugged terrain and availability of weaponry means that they will never rid the nation of armed thugs who will come in and overthrow the government the minute the US leaves. So we can stay there and waste more money or we can leave now and cut our losses.
I would say that the SDMB was a helper in changing some of my views. For starters, I couldn’t escape the fact that the people arguing against me (or my beliefs) were smarter, cited more, and had better arguments than those that supported my beliefs.
I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things. Sometimes in odd directions. Over the last ten years or so I’ve become simultaneously more pro-gay, and also more opposed to abortion and feminism more generally. (All that coincided with a religious conversion).
I’ve always been on the far left on economic issues, but I used to be pretty much a communist, and have moved towards favouring a market-based socialism, something along the lines of the old Yugoslavia.
Not to begin a hi-jack, but I never get this sentiment. If one is okay with the morality of the state taking someone’s life, but the problem is that too many innocent people alight be being killed, it seems that the logical next step is to adopt a stance that raises the bar for capital punishment. The stories about those who have been—or might have been—killed who were innocent definitely calls for a fresh look at things, but I don’t see why should simply skip past a much more cautious approach and jump straight to “No more Death Penalty”.
The only ‘bar’ is the one the jury already dealt wth when reaching a verdict of ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’.
What determines a death penalty isn’t the quality or amount of of evidence but the nature of the offence - so there is no “bar to be raised”, unless you’re proposing another standard to ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’.
I am. Maybe it’s beyond ALL doubt. Not sure how best to go about it. Or maybe give judges some discretion. I’m in favor of the death penalty. But I think it would be best to use it more seldom, and when it is used make the execution come more swiftly. And since we have a bar that is raised where there is ZERO doubt, we can zip through the appeals process. This 22 years on death row is ridiculous. Take the handful of people for whom there is zero doubt. Have a panel of judges who are not morally opposed to DP review any appeals and get the whole thing done in a few months. As an added bonus, we strengthen the deterrent factor by more closely associating the heinous act with society’s answer.
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