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1. Alex
   January 6th, 2008 at 9:54 pm

   I changed my mind about capital punishment. I used to think that there are crimes so heinous that the only suitable punishment is the death penalty.

   I still think there are criminals who deserved to die slow, painful deaths a thousand times over, but I’ve lost confidence in the justice system in determining guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

   Whenever I read reports of inmates released after decades of incarceration for crimes they didn’t commit, I thought “how many people have we put to death for crimes they didn’t commit?”

2. Doctor Slack
   January 7th, 2008 at 12:23 am

   I’ve changed my mind about a fair number of things, but the biggest shift is probably in my thinking about the durability of Western democracy.

   The events of the past eight years made me realize how much I had previously taken the stability of democracy for granted, even though I fancied myself as having a critical political consciousness. Watching the US deteriorate rapidly (and hopefully temporarily) into an incompetent oligarchic police state, and seeing politicians in my own country who want to emulate this model, has been a major wake-up call.

3. Orionriver
   January 7th, 2008 at 7:43 am

   I have changed my mind about the second amendment. I used to believe the rhetoric behind the actual writing of the right, and to a certain extent still do. I still believe that an armed populace is necessary for the maintenance of a free state, but I don’t believe that an armed populace can be functionally achieved in the face of modern weaponry, when moderation has restricted the purchase of military-grade weapons such as automatics and RPGs. In light of the increasing social cost of guns on society, and in the face of the mounting ineffectiveness of these weapons to combat tyranny, I can’t in good conscience condone the purchase and possession of firearms.

4. Louise
   January 7th, 2008 at 8:26 am

   I changed my mind about the ability of people to change.

   When I was in high school and college, I was taught that science had shown that the brain continued to grow an learn, making new connections, until about age 20 or so. After that, it began to essentially disintegrate. No new neuronal growth, no restructuring of the neuronal connections, just a long slide into elderly senescence. This explained why all the great mathematical and engineering breakthroughs were made bt young people.

   What a depressing prospect it offered! If you hadn’t achieved intellectual greatness by 25, tant pis pour vous.

   In the past 25 years, neuroscience has proven that the old beliefs are all a bunch of malarkey. The brain keeps making new connections til the moment we die. Even stroke victims can, with sufficient work and time, restructure their brains. No higher cortical function is fixed and immutable; your brain, and your self, will become what you pay attention to.

   Humans can and do change - their minds, their beliefs, their talents, their personalities. If you believe that you can change - and work at it - you will. Even your IQ can be changed, which was considered once to be a fixed quantity, permanent shy of debilitating brain damage.

   There is no justification to saying, “well, that’s just the way I am,” because we have the ability to become different people.

5. Sid Morrison
   January 7th, 2008 at 11:36 am

   Like Alex, over the years I have changed my mind about capital punishment. Our reasons may be slightly different, though. Alex’s reason seem to lean towards possible ambiguity in guilt. That is a valid argument, but I’m not sure it is the only one. On occasion, there is absolutely no ambiguity (say somebody assassinates somebody in view of hundreds of people and is immediately apprehended). Regardless of certainty of guilt, I no longer feel it is man’s moral perogative to take life as punishment (blowing away thine enemy in a just war is another story of course).

   I have a few supporting arguments–
   1. To be “fair” to the accused, there is a very long appeal process, resulting in punishment being ultimately metered out decades after the crime. I’m not sure what it buys at that point other than vengeance.
   2. I think a lot of criminals would prefer to die and thus we are ultimately granting *their* wishes. Rather, I’d like to see them spend their lives hard at work in a serious hard labor prison in a small dark cell– someplace in which they would not enjoy life. No TV, phone calls, weight rooms, conjugal visits, or other “carrots” dangled in front of them to keep them docile.

6. Christophe
   January 7th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

   I change my ming about humanity.

   There is no good in human. We’re just animals.
   Progress may allow us to behave “humanly”, but the least loss of civilization leads us to animal like behaviour : New Orleans’s Katrina, Terrorism, misuse of religions, practical communism, nazism and co.

   Everyday we’re sizing up our competitors males/females for fame, power, money, sex. Any false move and you’ll be crunched. Who got the cute girl you had a cruch on? the alpha male!

   No, humans are just animals.
   I’m not expecting anything from them anymore.

   “1 winner, 42 losers. I eat losers for breakfast”. Lightning McQueen (OMG, cars too!)

7. ruby
   January 7th, 2008 at 3:35 pm

   I know I will probably get mocked for this…but religion is the big thing I have changed my mind about. Growing up in a less than desirable household, I was sure God was non-existant. I spent my teens years switching from antheism to satanism to wicca finally landing on agnosticism, sure that we are here due to some primordial soup. I spent my 20’s thinking this until I had a falling accident and ended up losing my ability to walk unaided. I had to use a quad cane and was on some heavy painkillers for 6 months. No one could figure out what was wrong with me, I become suicidal and tried to shoot myself. I was too weak to hold the gun to my head and so I remained trapped in my body. The docs came to believe I was quickly degenerating and would have less than a year to live. Long story made short, I prayed and gave in to God. A week later I was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer and two weeks later after the operation, I was walking again on my own. Even when we knew what kind of cancer I had, the docs thought that I would never walk again. I surprised everyone by walking on my own three days after the operation. The entire nursing staff and docs came to see me as proof of the removal success. Today, I am athletic and active 10 years later and still cancer free.

   Looking back, I would never have guessed I’d ever make peace with God. We all make our own choices, and that was my big one.

8. Alex
   January 8th, 2008 at 2:37 am

   Thank you for the interesting thoughts, guys. I’m not as pessimistic as Doctor Slack on the future of democracy.

   Sid Morrison: you’re right. Ambiguity of guilt (or more directly, the inherent inability to fully and conclusive determine guilt in all cases) is a big reason for me to change my mind on capital punishment, but I agree with your other points.

   Orionriver: we’ve had a long and interesting (though I’m not sure anyone changed anyone else’s mind) on the Second Amendment here.

   Good to hear that you’ve recovered and are cancer-free, ruby!

9. Steve Salmony
   March 10th, 2008 at 2:00 pm

   Thanks for asking so incisive and provocative a question.

   I have changed my mind about human prospects on Earth. Perhaps Stephen Hawking is correct about the necessity for humanity to find another home because we appear to be adamantly pursuing a path to the future that could lead us to an unimaginable calamity of some kind.

   If it is all right to do so, let me explain briefly. The family of humanity appears not to have more than several years in which to make necessary changes in its conspicuous over-consumption lifestyles, in the unsustainable overproduction practices of big-business enterprises, and its overpopulation activities. Humankind may not be able to protect life as we know it and to preserve the integrity of Earth for even one more decade.

   If we project the fully anticipated growth of increasing and unbridled per-capita consumption, of rampantly expanding economic globalization and of propagating 70 to 75 million newborns per annum, will someone please explain to me how our seemingly endless growth civilization proceeds beyond the end of year 2012.

   According to my admittedly simple estimations, if humankind keeps doing just as it is doing now, without doing whatsoever is necessary to begin modifying the business-as-usual course of our gigantic, endless-growth-oriented global economy, then the Earth could sustain life as we know it for a time period of about 5 more years.

   It appears to me that all the chatter, including that heard in most “normal science” circles, of a benign path to the future by “leap-frogging” through a ‘bottleneck’ to population stabilization in 2050, is nothing more than wishful and magical thinking.

   Unfortunately, even most of our top rank scientists have not found adequate ways of communicating to humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the reckless dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of Earth’s frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.

   Steven Earl Salmony
   AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
   established 2001
   http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

10. Steven Earl Salmony
    April 18th, 2008 at 10:31 am

    Dear Friends,

    I am imagining that the following questions are rhetorical ones to many people in the EDGE community.

    “Why are politicians and skeptics so willing to risk their future and everyone else’s future on blindly clinging to a course of action that has a high probability of leading to a seriously crippled future? If you even suspect that global warming represents a serious risk to your survival (and we have far more than suspicion these days), why wouldn’t you do everything protect and conserve your planet?”

    It would please me to hear from others; but from my humble perspective the “answers” to these questions are all-too-obvious.

    The leaders in my generation of elders wish to live without having to accept limits to growth of seemingly endless economic globalization, of increasing per capita consumption and skyrocketing human population numbers; our desires are evidently insatiable. We choose to believe anything that is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially agreeable; our way of life is not negotiable. We dare anyone to question our values or behaviors.

    We religiously promote our shared fantasies of endless economic growth and soon to be unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction oand overpopulation activities, and in so doing deny that Earth has limited resources upon which the survival of life as we know it depends.

    My not-so-great generation appears to be doing a disservice to everything and everyone but ourselves. We are the “what’s in it for me?” generation. We demonstrate precious little regard for the maintenance of the integrity of Earth; shallow willingness to actually protect the environment from crippling degradation; lack of serious consideration for the preservation of biodiversity, wilderness, and a good enough future for our children and coming generations; and no appreciation of the understanding that we are no more or less than human beings with “feet of clay.”

    We live idolatrously in a soon to be unsustainable way in our planetary home and are proud of it, thank you very much. Certainly, we will “have our cake and eat it, too.” We will fly around in thousands of private jets, own fleets of cars, live in McMansions, exchange secret handshakes, go to our exclusive clubs and distant hideouts, and risk nothing of value to us. Please do not bother us with the problems of the world. We choose not to hear, see or speak of them. We are the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and the many minions in the mass media. We hold most of the Earth’s wealth and control the power it purchases. If left to our own devices, we will continue in the exercise of our ‘rights’ to ravenously consume Earth’s limited resources; to expand economic globalization unto every corner of our natural world and, guess what, beyond; to encourage the unbridled growth of the human species so that where there are now 6+ billion people, by 2050 we will have 9+ billion members of the human community and, guess what, even more people, perhaps billions more in the distant future, if that is what we desire.

    We are the reigning, self-proclaimed masters of the universe. We have no regard for human limits or Earth’s limitations, thank you very much. We are idolaters of the global political economy. Please understand that we do not want anyone to present us with scientific evidence that we could be living unsustainably in an artificially designed, temporary world of our own making…… a manmade world filling up with distinctly human enterprises which appear to be approaching a point in human history when global consumption, production and propagation activities of the human species become unsustainable on the tiny planet God has blessed us to inhabit……..and not to overwhelm, I suppose.

    Sincerely,

    Steve

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