Not knowing when the end of the world will come about, I tend to lean towards conservation… paradisaical glory may be some ways away…

Amen!!

#35 I have had a similar experience and find myself both a better and worse missionary if that is possible. Better because I am able to connect with a wider range of people but worse because, as you expressed, I am much less insistent on my beliefs over the other person.

One of the positions that I have shifted slightly on is abortion. Someone mentioned this above that many of the anti-abortion groups take a stand farther right than that promoted by the Church. I don’t know if many of those at Church are aware of this. For example prior to the election I rode to a meeting in a car where 4 LDS women discussed the upcoming presidential election. One woman was dismayed that her sister was supporting Obama and said she didn’t understand how she could support him with his position on abortion. I wondered how she could support the McCain/Palin ticket with Palin’s position on abortion but just kept my mouth closed.

I have always felt conflicted with regard to the treatment of homosexuality and now gay marriage and where I thought I had solid answers before no longer feel so confident in them.

I guess anything could happen. An asteroid could hit the Earth and cause all kinds of fun things to happen — and I’d certainly be a believer. At this point, though, I just can’t see anthpogenic warming causing the kinds of things that Gore talks about — and the 20 or so foot rise in sea levels is mentioned in his movie, by the way. (Plus, I think there’s a climatologist from NASA who’s predicted a possible one meter rise every twenty years or so. I think these ideas are based primarily on the the future collapse of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.)

Why not? Oceans have risen and fallen by much greater levels over the geologic past. Also, time scales are important here–I’d agree it’s unlikely we’d see a 22 foot rise in sea level over the course of a year (though I admit, I don’t know how quickly sea levels have risen in the past so my perception could be off here), but over the course of a decade or century I’d think it very plausible. Do you think it’s implausible that much ice will melt? Or that we’ll raise temperatures that far? Or is there something else that causes you to disbelieve that claim?

Where did you get the number 22 feet, by the way? I don’t follow predictions for sea level rise very closely, so I’m curious what your source for that claim is.

Being willing to try things out and roll them around in your head for a while…being willing to act on different ideas…even things you don’t want to be right.

I ate raw foods for six months this last summer and was shocked at the difference it made in some health issues-especially a tooth ache. I really didn’t want that to be the answer-I really love bread-but there you are, it worked like crazy.

On that note though I strongly feel that some people have a revelatory experience for one and assume it should be applied en masse. That drives me nutty.

My favorite global warming tidbit is related to volcanoes-somehow at the time of volcanoes errupting and releasing all their atmostphere wrecking gasses, plants in their area somehow “magically” know to up their photosynthesis and balance it out. I think that’s neato

Most skeptics believe there’s some kind of warming going on. I don’t need to change my beliefs on that. Indeed, I’m not totally against some measure (however small) of AGW. But I don’t see myself ever going through such a radical change in beliefs as to accept the plausability of oceans rising by 22 feet because of AGW.

That evolutionary biologists spend any time at all wondering why more people don’t believe in evolution (or global warming or root beer floats) has always escaped me. Is natural selection taking care of the big picture or not? And if so, why all the ultra-short-term panic?

Seriously though being in a culture with such a strong belief structure (really a Certain Knowledge structure — we KNOW things, not just believe them — despite 12 of 13 articles of faith beginning “We believe…”) and OBEDIENCE structure, does make it hard to set certain beliefs down to pick others up. But just like evolution, it seems to happen, if very slowly. So all you enlightened scientific minds — just have a little patience with the rest of us. :)

We’ve learned quite a bit in the last 100 years, not least of all how to measure things better. Most of the changes that have happened came about because we learned how to make certain measurements, or learned how to measure things more precisely. Figuring out quantum mechanics had a huge impact on a number of fields, including my own (geology), all within the last 100 years. Stable isotope geochemistry (which I do) relies on quantum mechanics, and has proven an important tool in figuring out a lot about geochemical cycles, biology, ecology–the way the world around us works. We really weren’t able to accurately measure isotope ratios accurately enough to use them until midway through the last century, so that alone has caused quite a bit of upheaval–mostly in terms of answering outstanding questions. And that’s just one field, and not any of the ones you’ve mentioned. (medicine’s kind of a special case, by the way, since in many cases the kind of experimenting you’d have to do to truly answer a question is frowned upon.)

I can guess that you don’t consider working scientists good sources of information on the scientific consensus. That’s fine–as has been pointed out above, we all trust different sources for our beliefs. I can see how you might mistrust a message about science from scientists. However, I would highly encourage you to do some digging on your own–develop more than a layman’s understanding of the scientific consensus and then ask why (and really how much) scientific thought is changing on certain questions. I suspect that as you do that, you’ll come to understand more why we scientists say we’re right all the time and you’ll be able to be more critical–in a useful way–when it comes to scientific claims.