What the Heck Happened to Me?

When I went through my “faith crisis”, I had a lot to evaluate. In my journey down the rabbit hole of trying to find out what I had been a part of much of my life, I also spoke to a lot of other people that were going through the same thing. What better way to understand what I was experiencing than from people that had already made or were in the midst of the journey? I found a particular bent. They all seemed to be leaning left, politically. I was pretty conservative. However, with all my reading and listening to others, I hadn’t been listening to my conservative radio. My own life was much more interesting. Even then, I contemplated that the reason some of these left the church was due to them being liberal in such a conservative religion. No wonder they left. Cognitive Dissonance is a miserable thing to live with.

But, considering that I felt lied to most of my life about my most intimate beliefs, I wanted to know what else I might believe because of faulty information. I wanted to be ruled by evidence and not by desire. So I stopped listening to my right-wing radio. With listening to others and trying to make sense out of what was happening to me, I really felt empathy building. It was noticeable. I became much less of an island.

Holy Crap, I’m turning into a liberal! How the hell did that happen?

I guess empathy does that. I certainly didn’t "deserve" what happened to me. What about all those others that had things happen to them that they didn’t deserve?

I think I’m still conservative in some things. I still own guns, but I’m in favor of reasonable and realistic gun control. I think we should have a balanced budget, but I think our spending priorities are way out of whack.

Anyway, I am what I am. Sometimes I’m too much of it. Sometimes not enough.

I like listening to science and law programs. I realize now how skewed my old thinking is. I have a better understanding of how flawed our government is and some of those things really can’t be fixed. In other ways, our government is pretty good. I just wish we’d learn from other places, both good and bad. Our tendency for the concept of American Exceptionalism is overall damaging, just like religious exceptionalism blinds people to the suffering of others.

Oh well. I just wanted to say this.