Ask Lemmy

When I was in my late teens up to around 20 I still believed in God and religion. Looking back, largely to please my Mum.

My views changed because my brother was so dismissive about religion so I started to question it myself properly for the first time. I'd taken it for granted after being indoctrinated into Catholicism my whole life.

Once I started questioning and actually thinking about religion (rather than just accepting it as the dull background to my life) I moved fairly rapidly to become an atheist. I've never once doubted or regretted that change. I feel like it was a turning point in my life when I actually started looking around me and questioning everything, and developing as my own person.

Weapons as a human right.

I was on the fence about it before. But then I was homeless, got attacked by a stranger and beaten pretty badly, was saved by some other strangers because the guy showed no signs of stopping.

After that I went to buy some pepper spray to carry with me, and was notified it required a license. Being a homeless man I couldn’t get licenses for things.

I realized that it’s a problem if weapons are treated like something you need to earn privilege to own, because the underprivileged then won’t have them.

That’s why I realized it’s important we treat weapons as a human right, not as a privilege to be earned if you’re nice.

I'm another Libertarian to Socialist convert. Also ultra-conservative religious to nonreligious.

I started reading up on the origins of beliefs I held. I learned that Hayek (author of The Road to Serfdom, a father of Austrian economics) thought that his ideal laissez faire economics could only be sustained with universal social safety nets like UBI and healthcare for all. Smith (author of The Wealth of Nations, father of American capitalism) basically replaced royal bloodlines with wealth birthright, using class separation of ownership (and heavy emphasis on slavery) instead of historic feudalism. His system was basically the same, just replacing the tiny ruling class. And I discovered Marx wasn't some evil terrorist trying to destroy the world.

For religion, it was all the internal inconsistencies. The problem with fundamentalism is that it's self-destructive. Everyone fights over smaller and smaller interpretation differences, searching for The Truth, ignoring that you can literally back up any conclusion by justifying it backwards with the text. And everybody in a conservative religion has a lot of immovable conclusions they will defend to the exclusion of all evidence or all people.

Was a hardcore Libertarian till I finally read theory and realized how much Propaganda i had soaked up to think that Socialism was bad and unfettered Capitalism was good. Cringe so hard thinking about it now that I am a full blown Socialist.

Nothing I will always be right

I used to think conservatives just had a different view than my own and weren't evil just because we disagreed.

Yes. They. Are.

The more I saw what was seething under the surface, the less I believed that the modern right was worth a damn. And eventually Trump made all that evil that was hiding feel comfortable coming out into the open. The racism, stupidity and utter disdain for rules, common decency and human life in the modern right is sickening. I refuse to acknowledge an ideology that supports the ghoulish things the modern right does as being valid and deserving of a place at the debate table.

Disagreeing on zoning regulations in cities is valid. Locking brown kids in cages, separating them from their parents and shrugging whenever another dozen school kids get filled with so many bullet holes that we can only identify them through DNA tests while threatening their parents with being deported by ICE is evil.

And the conservative mentality that people "dont want to work anymore" is hilariously divorced from reality. There's a chemical company in my area that hasn't bothered to update their wanted ad on job sites for years. The starting wage theyre advertising at the low end of the pay scale is a dollar and a half below minimum wage. They require a BS in chemistry. They cant figure out why no one wants to work for them. That sort of stupidity is EVERYWHERE but its those damned greedy workers that are the problem apparently. You cant fucking survive on what companies are willing to pay and the degree of laziness in management is astounding.

And theres this pervasive mentality on the right where people would love nothing more than to cut wages of people that work in jobs that they dont respect like food service to supposedly lower prices rather than advocate for their own wages to be increased. Thats evil too. Theres a lot of evil shit going on on the right even if you ignore what happened with roe v wade being overturned (yeah theyre attacking women that had miscarriages now) As if there werent enough reasons for me to despise the modern right as it was.

Anarchism and Satanism; when I was a kid, it was just something edgy weirdos would talk about for attention, but as a grownup I am seeing the validity of the thinking behind these ideologies - without identifying as one - but I now see them in a more open and accepting light.

"cooking with love/ heart" means watching that damn pot get hot and when it says constantly stir, you damn well constantly stir.

half-assing steps doesn't quite make it in terms of taste and texture.

in my kiddie head, it used to mean singing Disney princess song to the pot while randomly yeeting ingredients in.

mad respect to cooks and chefs now.

I used to be a nationalist (not a nazi though), then an ancap. Now I am a socialist and have been so for about ten years now.

THINK. I used to think "if something is true, then it's ok to say it." Turns out, there are more filters you should apply before you choose to say something. There are TONS of things that are true, and you could say, but they are still terrible things to say.

Also, following THINK will save you from saying some things that you think are true at the time but are actually false.

Many, many things.

I was an extremely pious and devout evangelical Christian, no longer am.

I was pro-life and am now solidly and rather aggressively pro-choice.

I was anti-LGBTQ, turns out I’m very queer myself.

I used to be very into guns and was one of the crazy 2A folks, now I’m much more reserved with regards to firearms.

I used to say ‘let’s glass (insert Middle East bogey man country of the day)’, but now see the nuances of the situation which are almost always that the US did something pretty damn shitty to kick the hornets nest.

There are a thousand social issues, pop culture lies, health and wellness myths, and so many more things that I’ve evolved on over the past 10 years that it’s mind boggling. I’m absolutely nothing like the person I was when I turned 30 ten years ago.