In my early teenage years I made the transition from my fideist upbringing to rational investigation of what I believe and why. It wasn't really much of an epiphany; it was more like a process spanning a number of years. The primary catalyst for this shift was my activity of several internet forums, where I peddled my beliefs. After getting my face rubbed in the mud I realized that I basically sounded like a moron, so I started actually using my head and investigating. 

Non-theism to theism. Probably all the way to Christianity, but revelation makes my head hurt.

Initially triggered by Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, who made me respect religion for the first time ever, though it took me about a decade and a moral crisis to start taking it seriously.

I was never really a naturalist, but I'd taken the rejection of teleology for granted and had to basically demolish my entire worldview and start over. It was pretty tumultuous for about a year, but I think I've finally started to settle in. (At least insofar as I know that whatever issues I still have are emotional rather than intellectual in nature.)

Philosophy of Mind, initially. I've never been terribly keen on materialism, but "what if they're right?" was suddenly a concern and I needed to investigate it. The old questions of intentionality and rationality came up, and I ran across Feser's blog soon enough and got introduced to the Thomistic view.

David Hume was actually a factor too, since it was always very obvious to me that the universe could be popping into and out of existence, that there was nothing necessary about the laws of nature, and all the other fun stuff that happens when you toss out causality. I no longer see how the laws of physics could ever emerge at all if there isn't an element of final causality all the way down.

Hard to say, since I've always been something of a continentalist trying to fit myself into analytic categories. It tends to create more confusion than it solves.

Any integrated top-down theory of mind makes sense to me (insofar as anything in philosophy of mind makes sense), whereas attempts to separate out what is physical and what is mental do not. I'm fond of idealism, but ultimately lean more towards a non-reductive form of materialism. Back to my phenomenological roots, I suppose. When it comes to the mind and the self, all roads eventually lead me to theology, so there's no point in driving around the countryside first.

RomanJoe wrote:

Etzelnik wrote:

In my early teenage years I made the transition from my fideist upbringing to rational investigation of what I believe and why. It wasn't really much of an epiphany; it was more like a process spanning a number of years. The primary catalyst for this shift was my activity of several internet forums, where I peddled my beliefs. After getting my face rubbed in the mud I realized that I basically sounded like a moron, so I started actually using my head and investigating. 

Any new opinions or beliefs you developed in this time?

It's hard to pin it down, but I would say that I generally became more humanist in outlook, with an overall focus on how my religion (Orthodox Judaism) can incorporate all of humanity rather than just an extremely narrow subset of it. On the flip side, I've also (ironically) become more hardline on the so-called traditional values which underpin Christianity and Judaism alike, largely as a result of understanding the necessity and truth of those moral frameworks.