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For those of you who were not born into/raised with some kind of religion, how did you find your way to it in your adulthood?
I'm a male lawyer in my mid-40s. I was raised by irreligious boomers (who have drifted into extreme anti-religion in their old age). My childhood experience of religion was essentially zero. I'm not a hard atheist or anti-religious, but I also don't feel a "god-shaped hole" where many people seem to try to shove some kind of belief system (including the Current Thing) in an attempt to fill it. It seems more like I'm lacking the socket where some kind of faith module would even go.
I do much outdoors (pondering hiking the PCT next year, which wouldn't be my first thru-hike) and enough time outside will have me thinking "this has to be intentional Creation to explain why it's so amazing in so many ways." But it's a big gap from there to "sin is real and Jesus Christ was the son of God and sent to cleanse me of my sins" (yes, I'm aware that gap is where faith comes in).
I have investigated some churches around me, but all feel very culturally Alien (discounting the ones that would clearly be a bad fit since their doctrine appears to be "We Support the Current Thing, but we do so with a sprinkling of Jesus"). Church websites alone are enough to give me that Alien feeling. It's like the "Women Lawyers" associations that are technically open to all (to avoid problems with anti-discrimination laws) and some men do join, but it would take a Hannibal Lecter gurney and straitjacket to get me there--it is so obviously Not My Place that I would never go voluntarily. I get that feeling from any church I've looked into, too. So I can't say of the options I have near me call me into trying to learn more.
I am cradle LDS but needed to find my way back to the church after an atheist period.
For me, the beginning was reading the Sequences and realizing the LDS church had extremely satisfying answers to every anti-religion argument they made. Our answers for theodicy, the Invisible Dragon in the Garage, the nature of consciousness, free will, etc. are all quite good imo, if you are starting from a rationalist-adjacent perspective.
But what really brought me back was simple, undeniable, tangible evidence. I decided to try to pray for something (freedom from an addiction I had) and the result was spectacular, far beyond anything I'd have expected. I then set about more formally testing prayer and related things and found consistent, similar results.
I think "sin is real" at least should be fairly self-evident. There are self-destructive behaviors which both make you feel worse as a person, and decrease your capacity. Making an effort to avoid them makes us both happier and more capable of accomplishing unrelated goals. One can (and I have) run a series of tests to confirm this.
As far as faith in Jesus, I don't think there are any knock-down philosophical arguments that prove Christianity more true than, say, Hinduism. But I do think there are practical tests that work. Prayer and fasting get results. God doesn't ask for totally blind faith (that would be silly) nor for us to rationally consider philosophy in a vacuum to determine the correct religion (something very few, if any, humans are capable of). He provides hard evidence to those looking and ready for it.
The fact that prayer is what brought you back is really strange to me. Do you think there is any statistical evidence that prayer works? What about other statistical evidence, like people who live on coasts that have earthquakes tend to die more to tsunamis? Completely area-based, unless you make the argument that people who live on coasts are more sinful and thus encounter the wrath of God more often. How many people are mired in addiction that try everything, including prayer, and never make it out? Knowing that statistics has incredible predictive power is enough to dissuade me that prayer does anything at all.
I don't understand why you think someone could believe that prayer sometimes works and not also believe that plate tectonics exists?
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