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Which denomination are you? How important is it to how you practise - I mean, would you change denominations if you found one that fit you a bit better, or is it not really a big influence?

I know this will differ depending on whether your denomination lies within the Catholic, Protestant or Heretic branch. Oh, and would you change branches, or are the differences there too extreme?

I was raised a Catholic. However, after moving to Georgia, I became an Atheist. I felt that nothing could every fix the nothingness of the Catholic church. So, for seven years I remained an Atheist. Then, my step-dad died unexpectedly. Thankfully, I had an amazing friend who helped me through his time. And as a result he invited me to the church where I heard the Word and gave my life to Christ. I am a Christian first and foremost. I attend a Baptist church. My faith is the largest part of my life. The type of Christian church does not necessarily matter, though I tend to gravitate to Baptist ones. I have been in my current church for almost 3 years. SOme of the branches are way to extreme. For example, I don't think I could go back to Catholicism or even think about Heretic.

I'm Robert and I'm a Gnostic.

If I could isolate a point in my life when I first started seriously questioning the religion and beliefs of my youth was when I finally realized that my dad was not going to recover completely (He had broken his C4 diving into a 4ft swimming pool). My first question to God was "why are you against witchcraft if it can be used for good." I was willing to sell my soul to the Devil for the ability to make my Dad walk again. This was where I began exploring and eventually made up my own gods to follow along the way because the God I was told about was too contradictory. I continued to worship these thought-forms and fell into a bad Mr. Dark believing I was some demon banishing hero in the body of an earthling and the soul of someone from some other world. I hoped for some kind of end days because I did not want to be part of reality anymore. One good thing my thought-forms did was that none of them wanted me to kill myself or cause harm to others. I still called myself a Christian though I didn't believe a good portion of it (salvation, afterlife, OT rules) and I had a soft-polytheistic view of things so even though I was worshiping this god I didn't believe in, I'm still worshiping my god. I refused to believe for the longest time that I was just making this stuff up. I had no problems with living this dual life up until I got to college and was introduced to a flavor of Christianity I had only heard stories about. It was a real ugly side that I could not believe that one could call themselves Christian and still be such "dicks" for lack of a better word. I was told by my secular friends that this was the majority of Christianity. It made me ashamed that I followed what I believed at the time to be a hypocritical faith.

Instead of having the self-confidence to research and stand up to those that were misrepresenting my religion, I became an apostate. I became a Neo-Pagan seeker. I seriously considered Wicca for the longest time (confusing it for Neo-paganism) and even met a group that misrepresented itself as Wicca. After realizing what was involved with becoming Wicca, the alienation I felt from Neo-Pagans, and the general lack of any feeling of divinity, I almost ready to give up on religion.

I remembered hearing about the Gnostics in a college course a few years back and started to seriously examine it. The first text I looked at was On the Origin of the World. This was when I realized that I was on a similar track as the Gnostics because I noted similarities in the thought-forms I created with what was described in this text. I finally acknowledged that the beings I was serving were just thought-forms and I decided that I wanted to be a Gnostic. I stumbled and stumbled greatly. I bought into many, many of the misconceptions about gnosticism being presented such as that Gnostics were not Christians or somehow antithetical to Christianity, that what is being practiced today is the same as the ancient Gnostics. I even nearly got sucked into a cult. The cult situation was really the thing that nearly drove me away from religion. I was on the verge of become a secular irreligious atheist at this point, but God had other plans for me. Eventually though, through a bit of guidance, I began to realize that I had many, many expectations of who or what God is. One day on Feb 28, 2009, I let go of my expectations and asked God to show me what s/he wanted to show me. I finally saw the Light that scriptures spoke of. It was only for a fraction of second but it was incredible. All the questions I had about Christianity at that time were answered for me. And here I am now. I recognize that I still have a long, long way to go.

I've tried a million of them - baptist, methodist, wesleyan, eastern orthodox.

I eventually just settled on baptist, since that's the denomination I was raised with, and it's fairly informal.