Here's some things I used to believe along with what made me change my mind. These are in rough chronological order.
God, Heaven, and Adam
God, Heaven, and Adam were all the same person. This is the earliest belief I remember having about anything. I remember being really confused by it all, and it became clear gradually over time. I can't put my finger on one particular thing that cleared it all up for me.
The shape of the earth
The earth was flat. I remember my brother coming home from kindergarten one day and telling me the earth was round, like the moon. I didn't believe him at first, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me. At some point, I started believing the moon was the mirror image of the earth and that if I look at it and squinted my eyes enough, I'd be able to see myself and my brother. We used to threaten to push each other off the face of the earth back then, but when we came to grips with the earth being round, we realized it wasn't an option. I think what sealed the deal for me about the earth being round was a TV show where the host had a globe and was talking about the earth.
Night, day, stars, and lightening
I used to believe the earth was surrounded by light, but there was a canopy that covered half the earth, and it rotated around the earth. I came to this belief because of seeing somebody with one of those earth/moon model thingies on TV that had something like a cup over half of the earth. Anyway, I believed this canopy explained night and day. The canopy shielded half the earth, and that's why there was night on half the earth. Since the earth was very old, the canopy had holes in it that let the light through, and that was stars. Sometimes, during storms, the canopy would shake and form cracks. The cracks let light through, explain lightening, and it made a loud sound, explaining thunder. I don't remember what exactly changed my mind about this.
Hell
Hell is a real physical place beneath the earth where people are burned alive for eternity. The first thing I gave up was the belief that hell was a place that existed in the earth somewhere. I still thought hell was a real place of fiery torment, though. I think I gave up the idea that hell involved literally burning in fire forever after reading the New Testament, but I can't say for sure what exactly caused the change. Around the age of 20, I began to read Jehovah's Witness literature as a result of a friend converting, and I remember the passage in Revelation about hades being thrown into the lake of fire made me realize that the traditional view of hell was not right. Since then, I've come to believe that Hades, Gehenna, and all the imagery surrounding them, such as fire, outer darkness, etc., are just ways of talking about the suffering that will result from the wrath of God against sin at the judgment. I have no idea what the punishment will literally entail, only that it will be unpleasant.
Knowledge
Nobody knows anything. The reason I thought nobody knew anything was because certainty was impossible. For anything you believe, there's always a degree of doubt that cannot be overcome. Two things changed my mind. The first was reading Descartes' Meditations On First Philosophy and realizing there are at least some things I could be certain about, like the fact that I'm thinking and the fact that I exist. The other thing was coming to understand knowledge, not as certain belief, but as justified true belief. Certainty isn't required for knowledge the way we ordinarily use the word in our day to day lives.
Determinism
I used to be a hard determinist. I held this view because of high school physics, learning about Newtonian mechanics, doing free body diagrams, etc. I began to see that everything operated according to laws, and you could actually calculate the position and motion of everything in the universe if you only knew the initial conditions. So everything was determined, including us. I can't say that I ever held this view consistently, though. I still believed in morality. I might have believed in free will, too. It's hard for me to make sense now of what was going on in my head at the time, but I suspect it was something like this: For all practical purpose, we at least appeared to have the illusion of choice, so we might as well have free will, but in reality, if you look at things very closely, everything is determined. I abandoned this view as a result of reading William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland. I became a libertarian partly because I was persuaded that it was intuitively obvious, but also because it was necessary for morality, and it was necessary for reason.
The Trinity
God is not a Trinity. When I was a kid, I never thought that much about the Trinity. I had a very vague idea that Jesus was God, but he wasn't the same person as the Father, but I didn't really think it through or worry about it. When I started reading Jehovah's Witness literature, I started to think about it, and I became persuaded that God was not a Trinity. I still didn't completely agree with how the Jehovah's Witnesses thought of things. For example, I didn't think Jesus was created. I thought of Jesus kind of like I thought of Joseph when Pharaoh put him in charge of Egypt. It says that to the people, Joseph was Pharaoh, and I figured Jesus was God in a similar sense. The start of my change was reading Reasoning From the Scriptures With Jehovah's Witnesses by Ron Rhodes. Rhodes made a case for the deity of Jesus I thought was surprisingly strong. I still wasn't a Trinitarian, though, and I wasn't totally convinced. Then I read The Forgotten Trinity by James White, and I was a full blown trinitarian by the end of it. (Here's a series of blog posts I did on the Trinity.)
Physicalism vs. substance dualism
I used to believe we were purely physical beings without an immaterial soul capable of disembodied existence. I thought we ceased to exist between death and resurrection. This was, again, due to reading Jehovah's Witness literature. What changed my mind was reading Scaling the Secular City by J.P. Moreland. I was initially persuaded by the philosophical arguments for substance dualism but later began to see that it could be defended Biblically as well.
The Sabbath
I used to not have a clear view on the Sabbath, but it was probably something like the Sabbath being an obligation to rest one day a week. I ran into a Seventh Day Adventist Chaplain when I was in the navy who persuaded me that the Sabbath was on Saturday, and that Christians are obligated to keep it. I change my view in my late 20's or early 30's as a result of studying certain passages in the New Testament. The view I have now is that the Sabbath is on Saturday, but Christians are not obligated to observed it the way its observance is prescribed in the Mosaic law. I see it a matter of personal conscience now.
Pre-marital sex
I used to believe there was no such thing as pre-marital sex because sex is what made you married in God's eyes. I came to this belief as a result of reading the Bible and thinking about various passages (I wrote this article explaining my view some time in the late 90's). I changed my mind as a result of reading J. Budziszewski's article, "The Revenge of Conscience." He persuaded me to give more weight to my moral intuitions, and since the idea of pre-marital sex did not sit well with my moral intuitions, I decided my view must be wrong.
Once saved, always saved
I used to believe you could lose your salvation. I came to this belief purely by reading the Bible. There were multiple places that made it look like you could lose your salvation. I changed my mind after becoming a Calvinist, but this was the hardest part of the change for me. After converting, it took a while for me to iron out all the Biblical kinks. After I became persuaded that Calvinism permeated the Bible, I stopped worrying about ironing out all the kinks. I figured even if there were verses whose meaning didn't fit neatly into Calvinism, I'd have more problems if I weren't a Calvinist than if I were.
Calvinism
I once rejected Calvinism. The beginning of my change was reading The Potter's Freedom by James White, particular the chapter on John 6. That argument was my primary reason for becoming a Calvinist, but I didn't become one right way. It was only after more reading and looking into things that I came around. It still happened in a relatively short amount of time, though. (Here's a more detailed account of my conversion to Calvinism.)
Free will
I used to believe in libertarian free will. It was mainly because of William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland that I held this view. Before that, I had a vague and poorly defined concept of free will. I changed my mind as a result of reading The Freedom of the Will by Jonathan Edwards. I was already a Calvinist at this point, so I remained a libertarian for a while after becoming a Calvinist. Edwards' book turned me into a compatibilist.
A vs. B theory of time
I used to be inconsistent in my theory of time. On the one hand, I used to say to people that the present is all that exists. The past is gone, and the present hasn't arrived. We live in an instantaneous moment that is continuously changing. That's the A theory of time. But then I'd also say that God exists outside of time and the whole spectrum of time is laid out before him as if it were all "now" from his point of view. That would indicate a B theory of time. I never saw the contradiction. Reading William Lane Craig solidified my belief in the A theory of time. Just in the last three years or so, I've started to cozy up to B theory. A big part of it has to do with special relativity and how it entails that there's no absolute simultaneity. Brian Greene's bread slice illustration had a lot to do with me warming up to the B theory. I'm not totally persuaded, though, because there are some physicists who don't think special relativity entails the B theory of time, and also because I think the philosophical case for the A theory is stronger. So I'm on the fence about it.
There's probably other stuff I'm not remembering right now, but there you go.
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