11 - Catholic, although I didn't believe all Catholic doctrines. I never really accepted Trinitarianism, for instance. I also didn't see God as good. My perspective of God bordered on Deism, aside from the fact that I believed I would face divine judgment according to his laws after death. I did believe in a literal Adam and Eve and a literal Noah's Flood, though, and that the road to Heaven was extremely narrow. I was constantly afraid that some stray thought of mine would condemn me to an eternity of hellfire.
This was due to spending a good portion of my youth in Catholic school, but going to a fundamentalist-leaning Baptist church on Sundays. I was raised on a great variety of Christian media. I didn't fully realize that many of the other people I went to school with were not Christian, because I assumed it was general knowledge. Looking back, this lead to me being unintentionally insensitive if not outright incendiary. I was a little bit of a crusader. I wanted to be a warrior of God and to fight at the side of angels against the forces of evil.
22 - Gnostic, specifically a Neo-Sethian Alchemist. My fear of Hell drove me to search for the correct Christian denomination, which sent me on a lengthy journey studying everything from Rastafarianism to Swedenborgianism to Rosicrucianism. Most modern Christian denominations arose out of the proto-Orthodox Church, was patently false about pretty much everything it taught.
Aside from Trinitarianism being impossible, the proto-Orthodox Church taught a variety of very literal interpretations about the Heavens, the age of the earth, Adam and Eve, Noah's Flood, and so on that it became clear that mainstream Christianity was poisoned at the very root. From the proto-Orthodox Church obviously came Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism, as well as inspiring the groundwork for the majority of Christian New Religious Movements like the Church of the Latter-Day Saints and the Jehovah's Witnesses.
So I was convinced that, if there was any truth to Christianity, it had to have something to do with its mystical and esoteric undercurrents that influenced Christian monasticism. I still believed that the Orthodox and Catholic monks had genuine spiritual experiences and that the Holy Spirit was using these institutions to help those searching for God, but I had invalidated all of their doctrine as merely millennia of shifting the goalposts. Luckily, ancient Gnostics started with mystical and esoteric interpretations of scripture in direct contrast to the literalism of the proto-Orthodox Church; it was their willingness to deny Biblical literalism that had them persecuted for heresy, which is hilariously ironic given that the same institutions which persecuted them have mostly fallen to less literal interpretations in the modern age, too.
That made me think that Gnosticism might have something to it. After quite a bit of research, I settled on Sethianism since it was the early Gnostic sect that most of the later sects splintered off of. I figured that I could become a practicing Sethian while I continued my research, and my experience with Sethian mysticism would help me understand the roots of whatever direction I went in afterwards.
My worldview was that of a very strict mind-matter dualist. To me, my mind was the only thing that was truly "real" since the external world belonged to the Demiurge, not God. Because of this, I was bordering on solipsism and psychosis. I was living an extremely strict ascetic life, isolated almost completely from society in the middle of the rural countryside and spending the majority of my time either studying Gnosticism or in contemplative prayer.
So it's safe to say that my relationship with religion has always been one that I've jumped into with both feet.
