fyi I just encountered this thread...
I would say I was irreligious but that I was exposed to Russian Orthodox and Catholicism.
I was in a Catholic high school and took religion class I remember we tended to write much about the encyclicals.
So before Islam I practiced nothing, our family were not practicing Muslims.
Intriguing, I grew up a non-denominational Protestant as a kid, then was an anti-religious Atheist throughout my teens, then afterwards explored the whole gambit of eastern religion, mysticism and occultism after that. The more I explored the more I realized how my views as an Atheist were flawed. At some point many years ago I was profoundly affected reading the Qur'an (and as someone already literate with the Bible, Upanishads, Pali Canon etc) and had a complete transformation within myself. The intense hatred towards Muhammad coming from Christians and Atheists also led me into actually researching Muhammad's life from credible sources which made it impossible for me to not see Muhammad as the greatest man in history and most relevant Prophet to this irreligious time we are living in, at the same time as the only answer to the deeply flawed (to the roof) religion of Christianity.
But I've read it all and continue to. I'm a skeptic, a rationalist, a mystic, a Strong-Monotheist and activist against Nihilism. At the same time, i consider myself a radical-pacifist through the sphere of intellectual-necessity. Action is potentially evil without reason. As you may notice from some of my posts here, I am very much against belief-of-belief, of which the Qur'an itself so vehemently condemns. Knowledge is the path and blessing from God.
