Many years ago was a typical materialist, science and debate bro (half of Reddit lol) who went down the regular path of existential anguish that is pretty normalized in todays youth, failing to deal with the problem of the absurd. Various philosophers grapple with this (Sartre, Camus, nietzsche). I found them to be pretty lackluster and I always much favored epistemology as the real meat-and-bones of philosophy.

I was so opposed to dogmatic thought I was enforcing my own kind of dogma of scientism and materialism that I wasn’t self-aware enough to realize. After my epistemology graduated to a slightly less amateur understanding I started to really appreciate other philosophers such as kierkegaard or William James as truly quite genius. James proposed an epistemology compatible with religion, kierkegaard was the only philosopher so far that made sense of the absurd and I found his subjective method of communication to be extremely captivating.

Tuning in to, and not dismissing my subjective experiences, along with plenty of advice from kierkegaard lead to me developing a relationship with god.

I eventually took that one step further and dismissed the Bible being the necessary word of god as being another speculative notion which kierkegaard also discussed. Kierkegaard always took Christianity as a given, but I never did, so Christianity was less permanent to me. Ultimately I just try to have a lasting relationship with god, and generally consider the dominant features spanning religion without particular attention to detail, I think kierkegaard would condone if not approve.

Anyways, TLDR: the pragmatic dialectic weakened me from arrogant debate bro, kierkegaard (properly) introduced me to Christianity and religion, eventually just became religious over speicifically Christian.