I often wonder how we can change everyone's mind into thinking like we do.....realistically. It has happened in the past. Gosh there have been strict conservatives who change all the way to a liberal mindset. There have been quite a few too. Now what did they do to have that conversion? We need to figure it out and somehow change everyone. I know it won't be 100 percent but if we could change 70 percent of the conservatives to liberals that could be a big deal.

The country is so evenly divided, a change of just 5% would be a tidal wave.

That is very true.

They are Bible believing Christians and they know the truth.

They live in a completely different reality than I do. I have lived 65 years and I have never been in a situation where I thought I would have been better off with a gun. Never. And I worked in a very tough part of town right along with the street hookers and the pimps.

Admittedly, I only considered myself a conservative while I was still a dumb teenager who didn't know anything about the real world. But I was raised in the South, and I'm a straight, white, male, Bible-believing, Southern Baptist. So if there was hope for me, there should be hope for anyone.

What made you change your mind?

I talk to a young man in his early 20's who is very right wing. He believes in state's rights. And he is very intelligent but I don't really think he knows a lot about the issue.

He still thinks that Evangelicals in this country are being persecuted. He's an Evangelical. Maybe they are being persecuted in other countries but I don't think that's a big problem for them in this country. Maybe people have made fun of him. I don't know.

I saw the entitled attitudes of the wealthy kids from the north-Atlanta suburbs, with their Bush/Quayle stickers on the backs of their BMW's. I didn't resent their wealth; I resented their attitudes towards the less fortunate.

I heard conservatives cheer when it was announced that Reagan's air strikes killed one of Qaddafi's children.

I met people from all over the world. I spent time with people who were very different from me, but still awesome.

I learned how a Capitalist economy works in Business School; and that it is profoundly unfair unless the government provides an adequate safety net for those who fall through the cracks.

Their idea of persecution is that other people exist who also have a right to say no. If they and their ilk had their way we would all be an underclass with them calling the shots - about everything. No one is interfering with their beliefs, most of us are saying we walk a different path and have a right to live without them meddling.

Republicans are the mentally ill. The Congress under Reagan wanted money that they received from the facilities to go into the war room. I guess they got their wish.

is full of shit.

And I was raised in the South.

Their view of the world is skewed.

That's why the Methodists tend to be a little saner.

I've never been to a Baptist church but there are a lot of Baptists here in the Midwest.

The Baptists are dunkers. That used to scare me to death when I was little. I think I thought that you had to take all your clothes off in front of everyone and then get dunked underwater. I found out that they don't take their clothes off or they wear special clothes or something.

I was raised Methodist. They just sprinkle some water on your head. It's not as embarrassing.

Sometimes, Baptists like to joke that their Methodist friends are just scared of getting wet. While we're in church singing "Shall We Gather at the River?", they are across town in their own church singing "Higher Ground".

There was no place in the church to dunk people.

Maybe the Southern Methodists were more into that stuff.

My sweet little grandmother was a Southern Methodist. She never wore slacks, almost never wore makeup (she wore a little rouge and lipstick if she was going out somewhere) and she didn't drink and she didn't dance. And unmarried couple did not share the same bedroom in her house. Oh, and no cards.

opposed to the practice.

In my part of the South, both Southern Baptists and Methodists are very modern in appearance and practice. We all dance, and the women all wear modern clothes and makeup. Some Independent Baptist churches still have women who dress "modestly".

Methodists around here tend to be less politically conservative, but they are still part of the South.

I'm not sure why that dunking stuff scared me so much but it surely did.

My father was a Boy scout leader and they met in a little Baptist church. I used to go up and just stand there and look at where they dunked people.

I was horrified.

so yeah, it's a little spooky.

Interestingly enough, Southern Baptists do not believe baptism is necessary for salvation at all. It's just a symbolic act of dedication. But we *will* make you do it if you want to be a voting member of the church. And we *will* make you do it even if you were already baptized in the Methodist "sprinkling" fashion. Personally, I think it's a beautiful ceremony but should not be required for those already baptized by other denominations.

that you rise up from when you are baptized?

Whoa. That would have sent me screaming from the room.

The idea is that I'm supposed to be dead to the old ways and my old sinful nature, and born again as a new creature in Christ.

Basically, I'm a Ned Flanders zombie now.

(Of course, we never manage to live up to our high ideals. No once can completely do away with their sinful nature. Not even close. But I do still want to try. And oddly enough, being a liberal is a big part of that for me.)

Yes on the bible in schools. See God doesn't have the power to go into a school. A school door is kryptonite to him it weakens him so bad, I remember reading how a villain put kryptonite on a chain around his neck and put him in a pool in the subway station to drown. So if everyone is given a bible they can shield him and he can get in through the school doors, but the bibles MUST be lined with lead. The kids should use really huge fucking bibles though. An upside to huge lead line bibles is if the lead is thick enough they can shield their bodies a little bit from shooters in schools.

I blamed Congress in a previous post but now that I think about it. I think it was Executive Order that Reagan used. Funny how it was ok then but when the President uses it, suddenly it is a horrible thing.

I don't think any of us would have predicted that 30 years later, we would still feel the negative effects of his Presidency. I was around 11 when he was first sworn in.

encouraged reactionary sharia in Pakistan, praised Argentina's Dirty War, funded Saddam Hussein and Iran, created smaller Mideastern terrorist groups wholesale, ran cocaine in order to run guns to people who told village teachers and doctors to step forward and then gunned them down and recruited through terror, praised Guatemala's leader for murdering 100,000 in two years--not caught in crossfire in battlezones, but a deliberate policy of murder to force the residents into strategic hamlets--backed Guinea, Somalia, and Chad's murderous madmen, made all his scheduling decisions based on astrology, and had his bestie the GenSek of the CPSU (in fact secretly encouraged by that same astrologer, who also adopted John G. Schmitz's lovechild), while the Heritage Foundation cheered all this on in their newsletter

today they'd just say Ted Kennedy was the one who did all that (until eventually enough Dems would start citing that as proof of the party's left wing's perfidy or something)

Do these guys ever read anything?

I just told him that I didn't want to walk into a grocery store and see a bunch of people carrying guns around. Or a restaurant or any public place.

Whenever I hear the words Christian and guns in the same sentence I turn around and leave the room. But he obviously doesn't have a problem with that concept.

New Jersey from 1958-61 every school day started with a Bible reading. In June of 1962 the Supreme Court declared organized prayer in schools unconstitutional.

The right wingers I know blame mass gun violence on mental illness but say it's too bad and something we just have to live with. Seems about right considering that getting meaningful help for the mentally ill these days is difficult if not impossible.

She is in her 40's and has been a heroin addict for years and years. My friend has tried over and over and over to get help for her.

Now she is back in jail and that really is the safest place for her. At least she is getting 3 squares and a bed and she's not out on skid row.

ill 50-year-old man across the street - high on meth most of the time and in and out of jail on various drug charges. No help for his mental issues available.

I wonder if he owns a gun?

Another friend of mine's son accidentally shot himself in the leg with a 44. Shattered his leg. He will have to live in pain for the rest of his life. He was showing the gun off to his friends. It went off.

She wants to carry. I don't understand that. I would think that once was enough.

We said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.

When I was in high school in Salt Lake City there were prayers before all the convocations. That used to irritate me to death.

We did celebrate Christmas and Easter with decorations, etc.

.. and access to good mental health care.

Silly me. Now I know it was my fault.