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Hi! I'm also sort of new here (only recently created an account but have been reading sporadically for years). For most of my life, I was actually a young-earth creationist, so I know a bit about coming from a closed-minded religious environment. Ironically, I first started to read LessWrong while I was still an ardent YEC (well before LessWrong 2.0), but I didn't feel that my position was in contradiction to rational thinking. In fact, I prided myself in being able to see through the flaws in creationist arguments whose conclusions agreed with my beliefs and in being able to grasp "evolutionists'" arguments from their perspective (but of course, being able to see the flaws in them as well). Even now, I would say that I understood evolution better back then than most non-biologists who accept it.
The only thing keeping me a YEC for so long (until the end of grad school, if you can believe it) was a very powerful prior moral obligation to maintain a biblically consistent worldview that had been thoroughly indoctrinated into me growing up. It took way more weight of evidence than it should have to convince me (1) that mutation + selection pressure is an effective way of generating diverse and viable designs, (2) that gene regulatory networks produce sufficient abstraction in biological feature space to allow evolutionary search methods to overcome the curse of dimensionality, (3) that the origin of all species from a common ancestor is mathematically possible, (4) that it is statistically inevitable over Earth history, (5) that evolution is in fact homeomorphic to reinforcement learning and thus demonstrably plausible, (6) that all possible ways of classifying species result in the same exact branching tree pattern, (7) that if God did create life, He had to have done so using an evolutionary algorithm indistinguishable in its breadth and detail from the real world, and (8) that the evidence for evolution as a matter of historical fact is irrefutable. It was after realizing all of this that I had a real crisis of faith, which led me to stumble across Eliezer's Crisis of Faith article after a years of not reading LessWrong. I remember that article, among many others, helped me quite a bit to sort through what I believe and why.
I'm not sure precisely why I stopped reading LessWrong back when I was a YEC, but I think it may have had something to do with me being uncomfortable with Eliezer's utter certainty in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Such a view would completely destroy the idea that this world is the special creation of an Omni-Max God who has carefully been steering Earth history as part of His Grand Design. Although, I did consider the possibility that the quantum multiverse could be God's way of running through infinite hypothetical scenarios before creating the One True Universe with maximum expected Divine Utility. However, this didn't comfort me much since it means that with probability = 1, everything we have ever known and valued is just one of God's hypothetical scenarios, to be forgotten forever once this scenario plays out to heat death. I've since learned to make peace with Many Worlds QM, though.