Hello and welcome to Lesswrong!
That's quite the journey! You've come a long way under your own sailing power it seems, and trust me, you aren't alone here. You'll find plenty of others who've made similar trips out of unquestioning dogma into exploration and experimentation. We each have a different life and learning, certainly. But many here share similar backgrounds (religious cultures, advanced at a young age, high intelligence compared to their peers) and many share similar resources (Internet as a connection tool, HPMoR as a gate way to the community). We are certainly glad to have you join and add your unique view to the conversation.
Glad to see you've already dove head first into some the resources. I usually try to make suggestions of the Sequences for new peoples, but I see you've beaten me to the punch! Yes, it's not uncommon to come away from some of the posts thinking "I KNEW that. I just didn't know how to frame it." That intuitiveness helps with introducing some of the harder concepts that get discussed here... and can encourage people to experiment with ideas and expand on them. After all, we aren't here to talk about how smart Yudkowsky or Yvain or Alicorn were when they wrote this or that. We're here to do better.
This is certainly a place where questions are welcomed! Living forever, gender, boredom, we'll discuss it all. Politics, of course, tends to be handled like an unexploded ordinance, but as long as the conversation is well reasoned and beneficial, we welcome it. You probably already know the site lay out, but if you'd like to start contributing to the conversation with your own posts, visit the latest Open Thread. It's a good place to start posting because it will let you get a feel for the standards and norms of the community and the types of conversations we have. Also, posting comments on other posts is a good start as well. Once you get settled into the milieu, you can start branching out, posting articles of your own, starting larger discussions, contributing more if you desire.
Oh, and, depending on where you live, you may want to look for a local LessWrong meetup group. These are great places to meet fellow LWers, talk shop, engage in rationality workshops, heated discussions, or just fun activities. If you live in a place without a meetup group and you're feeling particularly driven, you can also start up one of your own. Starting up a new group's a fun, exciting activity and, who knows, could be the start of a big movement in your own community.
Anyway, enough spiel from me. Definitely glad to have you join the community, and thanks a lot for sharing your story. I hope to hear some of your questions (and answers) very soon.
Glad to have you with us!
A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)
If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.
Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!