A friend from college emailed me about my post a few weeks ago about the exceptions that the anti-choice crowd allows. This started a discussion about how much my views have changed and she shared this recollection:

I have to say I remember you being a flaming conservative at Walla Walla, I happened to eat in the cafe when you and a couple other people were discussing invading Iraq, and I said very little but was thinking definitely not the place to bring up all my liberal viewpoints 🙂

Yes, my political views have changed a lot. Heck my views about just about everything has changed a lot, but most of those changes happen incrementally. For a trivial example, let’s look at my views on alcohol.

• Childhood – 20 (2004) – It’s unhealthy and morally wrong to consume alcohol for any reason at any time because God says so.
• 21 – 23 (2005 – 2007) – The Bible only advises against drunkenness, so the moderate consumption of alcohol is fine. Even though there’s nothing wrong with it, it still wasn’t something I’d do because it’s against the standards of the SDA church.
• 23 – Current (2007 – 2012) – Free of the unjustifiable standards of the church, I was free to try it and I liked alcohol. There are health benefits to the moderate consumption of alcohol, but excessive consumption is not healthy, so drink a little a lot and drink a lot on rare occasion, the liver will heal.

As far as politics have gone, I started as a social and fiscal conservative when I was religious. Since then I’ve seen no justifiable reason to restrict the liberty of others, which led me to shift towards libertarianism. Then as I spent more time in the real world, in particular working with a fair number of single mothers, I began to understand the importance of the social safety net and I shifted more towards the middle on fiscal matters.

With my views on abortion, I started being anti-choice with the only exception being the mother’s health, but once I was free of religion and seeing the limited scientific consensus on when the fetus is sentient (at least prior to the last trimester), I began to view a fetus as genetic and biological property, with the woman in possession of that property having the tie breaking vote for very obvious reasons.

It’s very common for people who were political conservatives to move to the left when they lose their faith and it makes sense. If you rejected one set of presuppositions based on a lack of evidence, then why stop there. We need to be skeptical of everything. We need to keep asking questions. We need to keep re-evaluating our beliefs and opinions. We need to let go of anything we hold sacred. Only then can we keep making an effort to be just a little less wrong each day.