Unintentional bayesian

Growing up in a very religious country, I was indoctrinated thoroughly both at home and at school. I used to believe that some Christian beliefs made sense. When I was 14 years old or so, I began contemplating death – I said to myself, “Well, after I die I go to Hell or Heaven; the latter is preferable, so I’d better learn as soon as possible how I can make sure I’ll go to Heaven.”

So I went on to read frantically about Christianity. With every iota of information processed, I strayed away from this religion. That is, the more I read, the less anything pertaining to it seemed plausible. “Where the hell is Hell? Can I visit before I die? Why doesn’t God answer my prayers to tell me? Why do some people get to talk to God but not me?”, I retorted. In retrospective, my greatest strength was genuine curiosity – I wanted to know as much as possible about the truthfulness of my religion.

The irony here is that wanting to become more Christian-like led to my abandoning of Christianity. But I continued to learn more about other religions as well, thinking that one might be truer than the other. Of course, none of them seemed every remotely plausible; I concluded that religions are false. I turned into an atheist without even knowing that that word existed!

Eventually I stumbled on some articles regarding non-religion and discovered that my lack of religious beliefs are called ‘atheism’. Since then, I have abandoned more beliefs tied to, say, politics or nutrition, thanks to applying bayesian probability to my hypotheses.

I had been an unintentional bayesian for my whole life!

Have you had any similar experiences?

PS: This is my first article. I am looking forward to hearing feedback on it.

Edit #1: I should have used the term ‘rationalist’ instead of ‘bayesian’ because I didn’t apply Bayes’ theorem explicitly.