Thanks for sharing this, particularly the ‘101’ sections on world religions. You might have done a Christian 101, which I’d summarize as “forgive people — even if they’re being assholes”. I’m glad you found something that resonated with you.

I was raised as a nothing, but my parents encouraged me to ‘figure it out yourself’. I did the same kinds of readings, but the one that resonated with me was the writings (what little is left is indirect) of Epicurus who wrote that, (paraphrased by Lucretius in On the Nature of Things) the gods exist but they’re so large and powerful that we are far beneath their notice, what we do here does not matter to them.

After all that searching, I’ve ended up as an agnostic atheist (god or gods might exist but they don’t much matter). I wonder how it would have gone if I’d been raised Catholic, like you.

This was long before Scientology — L. Ron Hubbard was still a third rate science fiction writer pushing something called ‘Dianetics’. When his ‘church’ appeared, I figured that L. Ron was trying to make money from replicating what was in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ — but with spaceships that looked like B52 bombers. The authors knew each other; Heinlein had some things to say about Hubbard. I’m not at all surprised that you find it shocking.