I grew up believing, never really thought about it. Then, in my teens, I started thinking for myself and the cracks started appearing, and I was a pretty staunch atheist for some time. Very big on pure logic and rationality.

Later on, I started thinking for myself again, and started recontextualizing a lot of the descriptions of “God” that were common across beliefs, rather than sectarian fundamentalist pulpit bluster. I was reading Spinoza and I thought of what the burning bush said to Moses, “I am that ‘I am’”, and something just clicked.

I definitely haven’t gone back to my childhood faith, but atheism is certainly something I changed my mind about. A cosmic consciousness just makes too much sense, rationality speaking, when you try to consider what consciousness is, how it originates. Either it’s purely emergent from complex organized matter, in which case the even more complex organized universe could obviously have it’s own larger emergent consciousness, or it’s a universal force that merely concentrates in complex organized matter. Any other explanation is far too arbitrary to survive Occam’s razor.