You might be weird, but I do the same thing. The quickest thing it usually reveals to me is the unspoken assumptions in my thought or question. For example, since most GQs involving “Why does X always Z?” have 32 counter-examples in the first 34 replies, it makes me seriously consider whether or not my idea is just another one of these.
There may be a lot of new Dopers who don’t get that.
Give 'em time.
Heh, was actually only half a joke. It’s also a real answer to the question.
I do this! Not so much GQ type stuff, but more IMHO. If I’m in a situation where I’m not sure what my next move ought to be, I consider posting my quandry on IMHO. Sometimes I go ahead and post it, but a lot of the time, I imagine what the answers would be. Imagining other perspectives helps me consider what to do.
I’ve been on the SDMB for so long (10 years?!?) I can’t even remember what I believed before I was a Doper. I guess I’m more libertarian about some issues than I used to be, like the previously mentioned gun debate.
But someday, if you find yourself in a fox hole with mortars exploding all around, you won’t ask God to protect you?
The most visible one for me has probably been support for same-sex marriage.
I also remember getting beaten up pretty badly ona War-on-Christmas thread that convinced me the phenomenon was more created than real.
In another vein, before this message board came along, I thought the distinctions between Roman Catholics as acceptors of evolution and certain fundamentalist Christians as young-Earth creationists was obvious to all, but several encounters here have shown me that some folks wrap up every Christian in the “Believes in literal Creationism, hates evolution,” camp.
That people are NOT hypersensitive screech owls?
My answer is similar to that of figaro; I am more likely to question the effectiveness of gun laws and regulations. It’s not so much that I am against regulation of arms, but thanks to persuasive and fact-based posts here, I am increasingly skeptical that that the laws/policies we have now (and those which are typically proposed) are the correct way to go about it.
Oh how I wish this was the Pit.
Let me just say as someone who has been in a foxhole in combat I did not ask god to protect me. I wished I was home with my family a couple of times. I screamed at my buddies to give me some covering fire. But I never, not once, ever asked god to save me. All my thanks was reserved for some rockin A-10’s and M-1’s occasionally Appaches, Fast Movers and Buffs too. Never forget the 105’s and 155’s. But not god. So yes, there are atheists in foxholes.
I’m a Christian and that hasn’t changed, but the majority of religious debates here revolve around the existence of God. I’ve learned that the need to recruit new members is a church-invented endeavor, and that whether people believe in deity of Jesus is rather irrelevant. If someone wants to see him as nothing more than a philosopher, at least they “get” the philosophy. If everyone started to love their neighbors as themselves, there would be a lot less neighbor retaliating going on. Beyond that, one’s personal beliefs are theirs to hold and nothing to fight over.
I came in here to post something of this nature.
I’ve had my excessively rosy view (grounded in personal experience) of the LDS church dispelled.
The board changed my mind about guns, too. I used to be radibly anti-gun, and thought it would be a good idea to ban them all. Now, I’m still not personally a fan, but I think that private gun ownership should remain legal, with some regulation.
I wasn’t asking you, askeptic, I was asking a guy who recently became an atheist, and whose conviction didn’t seem rock solid.
I am not at all surprised that you and many other true atheists never asked God for help, no matter what. I have no feelings on that matter at all. You sit in your foxhole and I’ll sit in mine, praying for both of us.
You know, I cannot honestly answer this question on this Board without getting myself in trouble. Interesting, eh?
Same here. I still think using bad acting wasn’t a good way to express the message of Showgirls, but it was a better movie than I originally had thought.
And that quote, my friend, should be on a T-shirt. I envision a black shirt with a skull with a green beret with a couple crossed artillery cannons behind, as the oft overlooked (shirt wise) artillery is what is being paid homage to with this quote.
I don’t know anything about God, but I’ll be damned if I don’t know a hellava T-shirt when I see it.
I used to think that people who lived in a state of denial about a particular issue simply denied to themselves what was obvious to anyone with normal powers of observation.
In other words, I thought they were simply delusional and lacked any foundation for their opinion.
It later dawned on me that the process of denial also involves, as an essential pre requisite, an active avoidance by the denier of any contact with, or any examination of, a source of information that had the potential to contradict or disturb the denier’s belief system.
I noticed that providing deniers with facts that did not accord with their personal and preferred view of reality tended to enrage them rather than help them look at things in a different light.
So yes. My opinion of deniers has been considerably modified and enhanced.
Count me in for the guns thing too. I used to think that no one outside of hunters had any reason to own them, and that assault-rifle-bans were a good thing.