I’m another Libertarian to Socialist convert. Also ultra-conservative religious to nonreligious.

I started reading up on the origins of beliefs I held. I learned that Hayek (author of The Road to Serfdom, a father of Austrian economics) thought that his ideal laissez faire economics could only be sustained with universal social safety nets like UBI and healthcare for all. Smith (author of The Wealth of Nations, father of American capitalism) basically replaced royal bloodlines with wealth birthright, using class separation of ownership (and heavy emphasis on slavery) instead of historic feudalism. His system was basically the same, just replacing the tiny ruling class. And I discovered Marx wasn’t some evil terrorist trying to destroy the world.

For religion, it was all the internal inconsistencies. The problem with fundamentalism is that it’s self-destructive. Everyone fights over smaller and smaller interpretation differences, searching for The Truth, ignoring that you can literally back up any conclusion by justifying it backwards with the text. And everybody in a conservative religion has a lot of immovable conclusions they will defend to the exclusion of all evidence or all people.