Fair enough.
Animal life, including humanity is constantly evolving. The values that made European nations great in the 16th century probably no longer do so today. We - humanity - have grown drastically in terms of population and we have been altered significantly by technology. Some of it may be bad, others are useful. Especially advances in medicine and sanitation have managed to drastically increase our numbers. And thus, it is good that we have made changes to the political structure.
Compared to Jehoshua, I was quite secular back then. Like him, I am still strongly opposed to the rejection of religious and spiritual ideas as propagated by such figures as Dawkins, yet I have grown to be equally critical of religious dogma that Jehoshua promoted in this thread. The Charlie Hebdo attacks were a rather life-changing event for me, that prompted this particular change of thought. The description that best describes my religious views nowadays would be 'transtheism': The belief that god or gods arguably exist, yet humanity exists besides them, not in subordination to them.
Last but not least, traditional gender roles, which served their purpose in the absence of alternatives as was the case a few centuries earlier IMO, are to be considered a retrograde force nowadays, that prevents humanity from reaching its full potential. This is not to say I have become a feminist, though I do think that with human overpopulation becoming a problem in combination with the widespread availability of birth control measures, neither male privileges nor hetrosexism can be justified any longer. Not in the affluent countries at least.
I don't regret my period of being one that believed in Reactionary thought, though. It was a highly educational experience that gave me some lasting insights. I still continue to have viewpoints that intersect with Reactionary thought (including my criticisms of Democracy), in the same way I might hold similar views compared to Libertarianism. A few years earlier, I held Libertarian viewpoints, and that was a similarly educational experience, even if I no longer consider myself a Libertarian.
