Michie,
My immediate family wasn't particularly religious. They were basically Christian, and my mother believed that the United Pentecostals were probably right, but we didn't go to church. Around 18 or 19, I started to attend a UPC church and was baptized. However, I had questions about Bible contradictions, whether their interpretations were correct, and about whether tongues are really necessary for salvation.
I looked more into those issues, despite the warnings from my church to not seek knowledge because it will destroy your faith. I also read about evolution, and concluded that creation science was false. After doing some research on the Bible, in particular reading Richard Elliot Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible," I realized that Moses did not write the pentateuch and that the stories of Genesis are contradictory and compiled from different sources, so it cannot be taken literally. Because I believed that either the Bible was literally true or else there is no God, I became an atheist.
Over the years, I began to believe that there were possibilities outside of Bible literalism and atheism. I was intrigued when I saw an NAB Bible, which had a description of Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis (the JEDP theory), which I had read about in Friedman's book and embraced. And I liked that the Catholic Church allowed belief in evolution. I thought of converting to Catholicism years ago, but it occured to me around March and the priest told me that I would start the process in the Fall and finish at Easter. By that time, I had lost interest.
When I met my fiancee, I considered myself a Unitarian Universalist. I hadn't been to many of their services, but I liked how they embraced a sincere search for the truth regardless of your beliefs. When my fiancee decided that she wanted to get married in the Church, we called around and found the local RCIA program.
As far as the Eastern church goes, I am part Russian. I attended a Greek Orthodox and Catholic wedding a couple years ago at a Greek Orthodox church. I was interested in learning about the Russian Orthodox, but I didn't like the idea of standing the whole time and no pews. When I found that there are Eastern churches within the Catholic Church, I was interested but never pursued it. I remembered it when I began RCIA, and thought about finding such a church. Luckily, one was only about 10 minutes away from my home.
