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.
Well, to actually call yourself a bayesian, some may say that you have to explicitly use Bayes theorem to do the updates. To avoid confusion, you may wish to use a more accurate term. Around here we use them term "rationalist" in the sense you were using "bayesian", and more people will understand you if that is the word you use. Ultimately, it's just a question of words, but you do want to avoid confusion and have people understand you, so it is a good idea to use words in the style others use them.
Duly noted.
I won't, however, replace the word 'bayesian' from this article's title and body with 'rationalist' so that others may learn from my confusion.