I wasn't a supporter of euthanasia until I worked in a residential aged care facility.

Until i was 24 I fell into a camp of thought called transmedicalism. Which is shitty because I am cis and didn't support a friend because of it. By the time I learned what a jackass I was being he died. Don't think my absence in his life was the nail in the coffin at all but there were way too many of us who ignored him when he was almost alone.

I don't think just doing a 180 on my opinion there was enough

A less shitty turnaround was my atheist heelturn. I only think it's worth mentioning because I wasn't awakening from Christian I was awakening from loose agnostic spiritualism. Thought I should be tolerant of people's idiosyncrasies because finding personal meaning is a deep need that we rarely ever get (Fucking ironic considering the transmedicalism, right). 2016 and the following events were my little clue-in to the possibility that people aren't using belief as a way of building meaning, they're using it to justify their worse impulses full stop. I never really respected enlightened reddit athiest brainlets but if there's one thing to take away it's that you don't hate belief in the supernatural enough.

Abortion - till i was about 14 i had thought it should be illegal, but then i grew up a little bit more and realized the topic wasn't like it was being presented at all. The truth is that in many cases an abortion is the best outcome for all parties involved, including the fetus, the person who's pregnant, and all of the rest of us in the world.

And when you start thinking about how to build a system in charge of differentiating which pregnancies should be aborted vs which should be carried to term it immediately becomes clear that if anyone besides the pregnant woman gets to decide then it becomes a literal waking nightmare of horror movie scenarios.

In any non-juvenile view it's obvious that abortion has to be legal, easily available, and entirely up to the pregnant woman to decide on

The American dream.

Born in a south American country, I've grown bombarded by USA propaganda. Later on, by studying word history through different points of view, I've realized the evil USA imperialist practices are and the damage it has imposed to all the "underdeveloped" countries. "Not all USA is bad, but it's always USA doing bad things".

That science and programming are hard.

They are not. It’s just a bunch of rules much like learning a spoken language.

AI. Back in the olden days when I first played The Talos Principle, I was convinved that AI would be cool and offer us fascinating insights into the mysteries of consciousness. I never expected... this

So many of them. So, so many.

Maybe the only one I’ve kept perfectly intact is my belief that the golden rule is prime.

I was raised a young earth creationist, picketed abortion clinics when I was elementary school aged but don’t worry I was home schooled from kindergarten through high school. Was basically a republican/libertarian until about 2015 when my spiritual leaders, including and especially my parents, began to compromise all of their values.

More recently, probably even until 2020, I viewed myself as an aspiring centrist.

Now I’m an agnostic atheist who is seeing how far left the political spectrum goes, and I still think centrism is a nice idea, in a totally different world than the one we live in, with a totally different meaning to “center”.

Here is the thing I should disclose though, because I suspect it applies to a lot of things.

I was raised steeped in a level of bigotry that was all-encompassing but cloaked in Christian love.

I have intellectually separated myself from that bigotry, but I believe I still have instinctive/subconscious/unidentified bigotries to work through.

I am trying to be very conscious of that as I make my way in the world, trying to love my neighbor as myself, and trying to continuously expand the definition of “neighbor”.

Edit: I also cut my parents out of my life entirely around the time DOGE sent their “fork in the road” email.

Did you do psychedelics, by chance?

I was very, very anti-gun until I was about 36... now I build them.

When my mom was pregnant with me in 1983, she got mugged at gunpoint in Baltimore and the gun was actually pointed at me while I was in the womb.

I used to believe capitalism could work if it was just done right.