Did you ever find yourself deeply changing your beliefs?

It does I suppose. I'm just worried about people not viewing others as having flaws. Due to being worshiped by people in an unhealthy fashion by some people who had crushes on me. So it's a personal thing to me that I don't want anyone else to fall into. On either side.

Well, I'm too arrogant to worship anybody, so he's safe on that count. ;D

Also I'm drawing a distinction between "not flawed" and "perfect." He's certainly not perfect - goodness knows that would be insufferable, anyhow! So I don't think I can count 'not perfect' as a flaw when perfection would be an even worse one. Though perhaps it would depend on how "perfection" was defined.

It's probably impossible even in theory for a human to be perfect — even assuming you could figure out what that means in the first place — so I don't consider perfection a useful concept as applied to humans. As a general rule: "Things can always get worse. Things can always get better." I find this to be a good thing to keep in mind sometimes.

I figure a major skill people have to learn is to view others objectively. Yeah, here are this person's strengths and weaknesses, let's not bloat either of those. I've personally never fell into the position of worshiping anyone but I've had more than enough rounds of being insanely jealous of someone and fixating on how much better they were than me or how much better they had it than me. In reality, that's rarely ever true.

As far as people to look up to, I've kind of realized over time that I personally no longer look up to a person, per se, just the good qualities that they have. As such, following that person as a role model and actually evaluating that person tends to be two very different things.

...

However, there are still some people's brains that I'd like to take a scalpel too. But that's totally different, I promise.

edited 2nd Feb '12 7:22:46 PM by Ramus

I've kind of realized over time that I personally no longer look up to a person, per se, just the good qualities that they have. — Same. That was one belief of mine that changed - I used to look up to people and be very upset when I learned they were flawed. Now I look up to them in a more nuanced light - I admire the positive while acknowledging the negative.

I've done some similar shifting to others in this thread as I've gone along.

As a child, I was initially raised fairly atheist at home (even went to a Jewish pre-primary school - my parent's attitude? Does it matter, as long as the facilities are good?), but very, very Christian (vaguely Baptist) at primary school (apartheid South Africa - with a host of other non-affiliated beliefs attached), as neither of my parents were into religion much.

Then, my brother and I actually caused a shift in my mother (triggered by actual bullying and hell-fire and brimstone induced paranoia by a couple of the teachers), and she started going to Church with us (Anglican) to help balance the books. She's now back to her original High Church roots — and occasionally thanks us. She said she'd actually had a hole in her life she'd been refusing to acknowledge, as the highly educated psychiatrist in her had been a little embarrassed to admit she needed those roots to feel centred.

And Dad, to be his usual stirer self, countered with the occasional trip to his own Methodist roots for contrast to the happy-clappy (school) and the stuffy (Anglican) — please note, these are his views. He also kept trying to instil the 'but it's a bunch of rubbish' school of thought at the same time, too, but it was on a rather patchy basis. Religion has never been a big feature of his life since university. He believes people just are people and whatever they believe is usually to help the individual person connect with their own culture to feel less isolated. So, it's all a bunch of rubbish, as it's just a crutch. (Again, his viewpoint...)

I turned very religiously Christian, but not exactly denominational. This changed over time as the general hypocrisy of the "Christian" viewpoint fed me at school started to clash with what I was starting to notice as the highly biased society around me. How could anybody call themselves a true Christian, and then turn around and say, in all seriousness, that another group of people were less than bugs? Just over race or culture? And, then, how could they actively pick on my brother and call themselves moral-leaders? (He is dyslexic, not stupid: and, I'll always defend him against anybody who makes that idiotic comparison.)

I grew even more disillusioned when we came back to Britain, and I hit a very much more hypocritical school environment (but, in totally different ways). At least South African racists wear their bigotry on their sleeves and don't pretend they don't have it, even if they can't see their own blinkered view contradicts other beliefs of theirs...

Now, if I were to describe myself, I'd say that I'm a humanist. Who acknowledges that God might, indeed, exist, but that we're horrendously bad at working out what s/he wants or is. Then, there's the huge possibility there is no God, and we're just being People enough to want one to exist.

Yes - I woke up one day to the realisation that blaming God and/or others for their hypocrisy was stupid, as it's part and parcel of the package marked 'human'. We make mistakes. And, sometimes, miracles. Love the good, and roll your eyes at the bad - it's healthier.

And, now, Dad doesn't look at me grumpily, but still despairs at my happy-clappy, naive nature. He thinks it'll give me grief down the road when somebody back-stabs me and is only worried.

Thank you, Terry Pratchett. You helped me a lot.

Atheist as a child, catholic post-brainwashing/cathecism, fervent atheist after His Dark Materials, and for the rest of my adoslescense agnostic, pagan, agnostic, pagan, agnostic, satanist, pagan, agnostic, pagan, satanist.

Now pagan (self identified as a pragmatic shaman/theurgist) whose views on Xianity shift from "decent with individual christians as evil" to "evil with individual christians as decent" every five seconds.