Wow, impressing that nevertheless you’ve managed to become a rationalist! Now I would like to hear how you achieved this feat :-)
Mainly by having read so much pop science and sci-fi as a kid that by the time the mystical-experience things happened in a religious context (at around 14, when I started singing in the choir and actually being exposed to religious memes) I was already a fairly firm atheist in a family of atheists. Before that, although I remember having vaguely spiritual experiences as a younger kid, they were mostly associated with stuff like looking at beautiful sunsets or swimming. And there’s the fact that I’m genuinely interesting in topics like physics, so I wasn’t going to restrict my reading list to New Age/religious books.
Mainly by having read so much pop science and sci-fi as a kid that by the time the mystical-experience things happened in a religious context (at around 14, when I started singing in the choir and actually being exposed to religious memes) I was already a fairly firm atheist in a family of atheists. Before that, although I remember having vaguely spiritual experiences as a younger kid, they were mostly associated with stuff like looking at beautiful sunsets or swimming. And there’s the fact that I’m genuinely interesting in topics like physics, so I wasn’t going to restrict my reading list to New Age/religious books.