Converts: why did you change religions?

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I mean from one Abrahamic religion to the next, from Atheism to Theism, from Theism to Atheism, from Christianity to Buddhism, what made you convert to your current religion?

My ASD.

As a child ....
-It made trips on the Bible bus miserable.
-It made going to church miserable.
-It made catechism events miserable.

Now I am non-religious.

You?
Are nonreligious?
I thought you were a Creationist.

*sigh* I previously defended the proposition of alien-seeding creationism as depicted in the movie Prometheus. I don't consider this a religion.

When I was about 11 years old (a bit older or younger, perhaps... I cannot recall exactly when), I became an atheist due to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

The immediate cause was a documentary I watched at the time about children in third world countries starving to death...

I know. Thats the conversation that I am talking about.

The way you argued it it sounded like you were arguing between the lines for theist Creationism in that, and in many other debates on other subjects. Not that it would have made much difference to the debates. But it sure sounded like you were implying that "If I (LNH) cant have God then you guys cant have Darwin, because I am gonna replace Darwin with space aliens!".

I guess I misunderstood you. But I still would have disagreed with you with the same vigor if I had known.

Logic. The gradual process of learning all the options and contemplating the evidence, it turned out that my perception of reality most closely matched Gnosticism, that there was nothing specially true or logical about Christianity in even its liberal Anglican form and there was a political history behind how it had arrived at its beliefs package.

* Luckily always from infancy had a scientific enough mind not to believe in magic, and not to expect any magic even from a God. So both the problem of evil and the total lack of evidence of magic tricks by a God only made me into an aomnitheist. A universal spirit view of God, as a infinite personal aspect of the cosmos which we are all the finite parts of, and who/which is not omnipotent. To reject omnipotence is a key break with the Abrahamic faiths' mainstream, but is part of Gnosticism.

Also disliked and decided against several other Christian ideas:
* One-sided forgiveness is unjust, uncaring and insulting to victims, and does not lead to fighting back against oppression. It creates its own problem of evil.
* The sick unjust and superstitious idea of Christ's death as a sacrifice paying for sin, which I had never been aware of or told was part of Christianity when I belonged to a liberal church ages 5 to 11. To realise that it is an original and standard part of Christianity was a shock, including for its double standard of conflicting with the pathetic forgiveness idea, not applying it to God. It too settled morally that I'm not a Christian, that I stand outside that box.
* Heaven, unevidenced and located invisibly in some other place that God would have to teleport us to when we die, did not work for me rationally. That's lucky because it also did not work for me emotionally, heaven could never be a paradise as claimed if it eternally would not be allow me ever to reside in, or even visit, the country on Earth that I had unfairly grown up in exile from. Ghosts made far more sense, and I loved them enough to be interested in reading about them from age 9 despite that starting from a point of not believing in them, as I had been taught the faith-in-science view against them. Astonishingly it turned out there was strong evidence for them, cause for anger against scientific atheism as well as religious convention. And it made perfect sense and a more logical cosmos.

Is it possible to believe while realizing the belief has no logical basis?

Great scientists such as Lise Meitner and Antoine Lavoisier believed in a Christian God.

I am by no means a Christian, but surely being a theist and having a scientific mind are not mutually exclusive.

It is called cognitive dissonance, everyone has it to an extent.

Theists who are scientist are interested in their specific specialty.

The question of god based creation, is a different question from adhering to the Christian idea of creation and all the baggage that goes with it.

So it does require suspending disbelief.

For me the Christian views reflects 1st century knowledge of the world and universe. So therefore it is not really on par with what we know now. So it would be pretty hard to relate that belief to modern cosmology, which makes it more unlikely that someone is a Christian and specialising in this.

Some have worked in the space industry, but less often disciplines where these positions would compete.

Genesis was written in the Bronze Age, and already contradicted the science of the First Century AD.

Believing in a creator is one thing.

Taking Genesis in the Old Testament absolutely literally is something else altogether.

The first doesnt interfere with belief in evolution, or geological gradualism, or with belief in an ancient earth and an ancient Universe. The second head on contradicts each of the aforementioned.

Only if you have faith.

Without faith, believing is just accepting what you are told to be true.

I was always skeptic, and that brought me to faith.
I left no stone unturned, and when there was nothing I had to accept what I saw and felt and realized.

I turned faithful.

Yet, I still read/hear everything with skepticism.

Paradox exits ONLY if you look at world with dualistic (binary) logic applied, and you believe that this is only way to see and understand things, and that's because we are told in the school that this is only right way.

Well, I didn't believe that either

I "converted" from Catholicism to atheism when I was fourteen. There wasn't any big revelation or anything. One night, my mind was wandering around as usual and eventually found its way to religion. I started to wonder if I actually believed any of what I had been taught as a child regarding God, the Bible, etc. I thought about it for a little bit and realised that I didn't. I went along with it because that's I was "supposed to do" and that was it. Continued life as usual. Felt no different.

Nah, they're not. I'm not religious at all, and I would even say I'm irreligious because I thought about it a lot and reached the conclusion that there probably isn't a god. Different people reach different conclusions based on the same evidence even if they're mostly rational, though. We all have different life experiences, different values, etc., that affect how we think about things whether we want to think that we do or not. Beyond that, we're all capable of just being wrong.

That said, obviously there are some ideas a person can hold that make me question how well they've thought about an issue. If I found out that Meitner was a geocentrist or something similar, I would have to wonder what was going on there.

I had an interesting stagger from Catholicism to agnosticism, to atheism, back through new age (begrudging best available at the time) to a brief round with Christianity again, reading the bible a few times through, ending with my dial on Hermeticism.

It's mostly been about a study of the details as well as, on the case of cultural conceptions, not worrying about the assumed contexts that get passed off on these worldviews from a pedestrian viewpoint. On one hand I might consider myself still something of an agnostic, but at the same time I consider the Hermetic outlook incredibly helpful as a narrative - particularly considering my sense that happiness and quality of life is mostly the result of the quality of our internal dialogs.

I do have to admit that I have had experiences that I can't understand. I've had times where I dreamed of laying in bed, having an intense energetic glow at the top of my head as if every cell in my brain and scalp were crying out in glee or elation, followed by a flow of energy pushing its way from my head to my feet like a stack of falling dominoes - the intensity of which woke me up right out of bed and I'm pretty sure I did have a physical convulsion that went with it. I'd had similar cell-elation experiences when I had a perceived being near me, through some kind of 4th dimensional window (best way I can put it in words) that would be best described as Mary/Isis/Sophia, ie. the Lady of 10,000 Names. Both in dreams and waking life there's a pretty clear difference between imagination or standard sleep-state dreams and things that bring another caliber of intensity, it's almost as vivid as knowing the difference between the kind of pain you take an aspirin for versus the type that suggests you're better off going to the hospital.

There's either a definite reality to this stuff where part of the confusion is that the actualities of things run cross-grain to popular religion these days (just reading anything of Israel Regardie, Dion Fortune, etc. demonstrates just how different the perceived inner world of the Golden Dawn ceremonial magician was, and with guys like Nick Farrell and Peregrin Wildoak still very much is) or there's something planted at the core of what we are, either by subconscious reflection on nature or by evolutionary success, which edifies this type of exploration. Regardless, the results - whether neurological or authentically reaching into scientifically uncharted territory - seem to go above and beyond what can be ascribed to wishful thinking, or at least I know in my own case if wishful thinking could provide powerful religious experiences (OR harassment similar to what Robert Bruce might describe as 'astral wildlife') I would have been having these experiences since my childhood and that simply isn't been the case.

As such I see my Hermeticism as an ongoing exploration and, on the more affectionate side, I see this as part of my play date with the universe.

Theist to Atheist.

I was 7 years old. I was at a (mildly) religious school, so there were activities in church and religious assemblies with hymns and prayers each morning. It was at this age that I realised that it didn't actually make sense that a God would exist. Suddenly, all of our religious songs and prayers and lessons simply seemed ridiculous - I couldn't understand how anyone could believe that any of it was real.

As time went on, my opinion was cemented more. I don't like to make uninformed decisions so, when I moved to my next school, I did deliberately join Bible Club to understand more about why people thought what they did. That just further cemented the idea that people are blindly following what clearly would not make sense if they looked at it from an open perspective. More than two decades on, I've yet to find a religious person that can give me an actual reason for their beliefs regarding some of the simplest questions, but as a child I did at least want to give people the chance to come up with an answer that would make me think or understand their perspective.

I can still remember the day after I became atheist. At the assembly the next morning when we would all usually say the Lord's Prayer, it felt wrong of me to do so. I sat, eyes open, and waited quietly whilst everyone else recited it. I caught a teacher watching me and genuinely worried that I would get into trouble, but of course nothing was said.

Hm...you know, I would say that's pretty similar to how I ended up leaving Christianity. It was more of a gradual realization than one big thing. I left my really conservative church because I realized that there was no way that I could believe a lot of the Bible was literally true. Then I slowly started to see how more of it was connected to those bits that couldn't be literally true, and at some point I realized that, when I prayed, I was praying to something that I didn't believe existed.