Religious: I grew up in a deeply religious household, my parents are still very religious and they consider that the cornerstone of their lives. No judgement here, they are great people and I’ve never once seen them use their religion to hurt others. For me, I appreciate the moral lessons I learned in that church and I think it made me a more empathetic person. I just have no particular need for a religion to be a good person. Stopped following any religion in my early 20s.

Social and political: See also 1. Being bullied as a kid made me have a deep rooted hatred for people who harm others, which means I tend to champion oppressed people now. Honestly, however, this should be a normal human thing to do. Beyond that, I tend to have a “live and let live” attitude towards most things so long as you’re not bothering anyone else. I guess that makes me one of those snowflake liberals that are destroying America?

A great deal of my negative experiences in life have been “for the Glory of Christ”

Fuck your imaginary sky men.

Reading, talking to people, thinking, observations, etc.

I am currently part of a church that loves these types of questions because it means that I can bear testimony of God and bring the holy spirit into the conversation. I don’t like doing so online with a profile that I try to keep somewhat anonymous.

There are two “science only” reasons for my faith:

• outcomes. Everyone lives longer, has more education, has more wealth, has more kids, but stays away from self medication (alcohol, tobacco, caffeine) so a bunch are on prescription antidepressants. Umm “by their fruits you shall know them” and (last I checked) education in this church is the only one that is positively correlated with church activity.
• pascals wager. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager

I have struggled with depression myself and have found the best solution is service. Church is a great “batteries included” way to serve. I also have a day of the week where I call up family and ask if I can help with anything. I was able to help my father in law renovate his house by making these calls.

Regarding politics. I hate political party “vendor lock in”. I have no clue how any of the issues get discussed based on how much astroturfing and bought/compromised news outlets. I imagine that my interactions with politicians is like reddit’s “upvote” where it really does nothing unless you sort by new. So I follow the money only.

Got raised in an openly leftist country, with socialist ideals permeating the culture everywhere and a pretty strong hard on on communism. No need to say that ideas never worked in real life.

I Experienced how it slowly drive the country from better to worse without any external output and meeting these public officials face to face always pointed to them using the position of power and claims of popular sovereignty slogans to pocket their own bags.

Nevertheless my family worked hard to raise us, a task becoming increasingly difficult by each and every socialist policy put in place.

Price controls? Everything became scarce. Of course the higher ups always had food to eat while we spent 3 weeks eating loafs of bread. The last week we didn’t eat at all.

Currency controls? Great, now whatever was remaining from price controls now was 100 times more expensive. Not for the socialist party members tho. They had access to the privilege of the American devil’s money

Defundind the police? Great, now the little safety there was while going out on the streets went kaput and crime soared even more. Oh but not too the government members, no. They had private security.

Food sovereignty projects designed to feed the population? Hijacked by the same leftists claiming to love the people to pocket their bags even more, with tons of food going to waste directly and never reaching people in need. Of course, you had to be a member of the socialist party to receive the little that did arrive, mind you. Nevermind it only lasted for a week, your human dignity was well worth the price, as the socialists had effectively lowered it.

Medical centers built all over the country? Sure, that couldn’t backfire could it? No if you count the exploitation of others brought to our country, and which salary got Pocketed by the higher ups, not only from our socialist government, but also from the party members outside the country of a not so far island. Nevermind also the usage of these centers as propaganda machines, only half built at times and being re inaugurated over and over for years in a wasteful showcase of public funding.

And much more

After experiencing that, I promptly proceeded to tell my history and my country story with socialism, leftists and communism in general, only to be harassed constantly by wannabe champagne socialists on the internet. Mind you, English is not my first language so my interactions are less than ideal, with much of my wording getting confusing to anyone not inclined to understanding and more so, empathy.

After all that, is it a wonder I despise leftists, socialists, communists and authoritarians to my core?

I’d say it’s not.

Being poor and being treated poorly was radicalized. Serving in the military reinforced my world view.

Somewhere in there, I even considered myself a libertarian. Then I realized how childish they were, learned how manipulated they were by rich, greedy people, and since gone further left than most.

I was directly programmed by George Soros himself in the secret city on the moon, as all leftists are. Duh.

I was raised in a pretty conservative religion that listened to right-wing radio and news. However, I recently deconstructed religion entirely and can see it for the sham it is now. Once I did that my political ideology completely changed to the opposite. I’m now pretty progressive and happier than I’ve ever been.

Religious views: I grew up going to church occasionally (maybe every month or two.) It always seemed fucking weird to me. Like, even my first memories of church I remember thinking along the lines of “wow the adults are all going along with this?” We stopped attending church by the time I was 9-10, and my dislike of religion has only increased since. On the one hand, for those that find it helpful to have a spiritual connection or believe in a higher power, all good. On the other, my social and political worldviews are colored heavily by two main ideas that don’t really mesh with religion, and especially not religion as practiced in the West.

The first view is simply live and let live. Meaning, no one should be legislating or giving a shit about something that in no way affects them. This can get difficult in a larger aspect because there are aspects of the law that affect me, but not directly. For example, even were I to have no kids, I would still argue heavily for strong educational programs because without them things that do affect me, like rates of poverty, crime, etc, go up.

Which brings me to my second point of view, which is “common sense” is probably just about the biggest misnomer in the English language, and few people actually possess it. We legislate and make decisions for fully irrational reasons that are often against our interest, see also, the entire Republican Party for the last 40-50 years. When it comes to these types of decisions, we should focus on rational, evidence based reasoning which often clashes heavily with the way religion works.

For example, combining these two things I believe that nearly all drugs should be decriminalized, regulated, and that as part of a comprehensive overhaul in our healthcare system, addiction prevention/treatment programs and even just safe spaces to do drugs should exist. If I want to do quite a lot of different types of drugs, that doesn’t affect you. Like up until the last 20 years or so, it’s an absurdity that marijuana was illegal everywhere, and still ridiculous there are places that it still is. That said, people who get deep into meth often turn into a societal drag because the addiction takes over, they start stealing, etc. In countries that have stronger focus around healthcare and treatment/prevention rather than policing and incarceration, they generally have more positive outcomes (lower rates of addiction, violent crime, etc.) and thus a better societal outcome for the rest of us. These sorts of policies however almost never get traction in this country though, because as stated above we often don’t react rationally and religion, which is based in virtually direct opposition to these principles, drives far, far too much (eg: > 0) of the conversation.

As for how I got this way, I have no idea. My family background is probably a feature-length Jerry Springer episode so it wasn’t really taught to me. My mind has just kind of always worked this way, and though I’m veering deep into copy-pasta territory, it’s all a lot like feeling really weird in church back when I was like 5.

Through 40 years of details that are impossible to sum up here.

deleted by creator

Once I hit my early 20s I had a goal for myself: to find out what the truth is, whatever it may be, even if it shatters my most cherished beliefs. I went through so many different belief systems. I explored every kind of mindset I could regarding everything I could. I would get very involved with some belief system or ideology for a time and absorb what I could from it and then move on to something else.

Over time, I saw a ton of patterns emerge and I saw that ideologies of any kind place a limited filter on how one views reality. I decided that what makes the most sense to me is to simply seek to do the most good while doing the least harm. Whether or not one believes in a god is irrelevant as life does as it will anyway. Adhering to a political party is just team sports. Social norms are basically attempts to not be uncomfortable and only pretend to be about safety and order (neither of which exist regardless of what social norms exist).

Raised devout Mormon/LDS. 9/11 reaffirmed political conservativism. Church assigned me to be a missionary (age 19-21) in Portland, Oregon where I found liberals treated me with better respect than conservative christinans.

In 2006, my house rep said something royally stupid, so I voted for his Democratic rival. And like Pringles, once you pop you can’t stop.

Today I’m a fiery but loyal moderate democrat.

deleted by creator