For some reason when I made this I did not think it would be such a personal thread for people. Nothing wrong with that of course, and I appreciate people taking it seriously.
I grew up an atheist and it made sense to me because I thought that science could by itself lead people into a more rational understanding of the world. However, my faith in that was tested severely by my fellow atheists not becoming more rational and if anything becoming less rational as they followed the trends of modern culture. Around that time, a friend of mine started attending an Orthodox church and turned his life around. Seeing the effect this had on him made me interested to looking into Christianity and Orthodox Christianity and seeing more of this effect that it demonstrated, so when he asked me to come to church with him I agreed.
I did not want to feel locked in to being Orthodox just because my friend was, so I looked at other forms of Christianity too. The problem for me with Protestantism (which in America is really seen as the default form of Christianity) was that, having seen the limitations of a commitment to human reason it didn't make sense to me to just transfer that commitment to the Bible. Why should I think that I was the one to get it right while millions have gotten it wrong? The only way out of this rut that made sense to me was to try to find the place where the doctrines had been kept unchanged from the start, and the place that seemed to be to me was in the Orthodox Church, with its unrelenting emphasis on continuity of belief and interpretation.
If there is a belief that is important and meant for Christians to hold, does it make sense that it could not have been known about or meaningfully existed until the last few decades or centuries? I've heard numerous views with relatively meager lineage be posited as obviously true by reason or by the Holy Spirit, both on Atlas and on other websites, and it strikes me that if these claims had any weight to them then it is meaningless to say that the Holy Spirit leads us into all truth. Given how easy it is for our reason to lead us astray into believing novelties, it didn't seem sufficient to me to rely on that.
Did I just make this thread to complain about people who annoy me? That has been a nonzero factor, and for that I hope everyone here can forgive me. But my hope is that I was able to create a space where people can share a part of themselves and edify each other. The internet doesn't have enough of that in an age where all we want to do is bicker and get points over on other people. I'm well aware of how much debating culture has shaped internet perception of the Orthodox Church, and while someone like Jay Dyer understands our dogmatic theology very well he doesn't communicate the ascetic and spiritual side of Orthodoxy, which is ultimately no less important.
Soapbox rant over now.
