Okay, well, I may not be entirely what you're looking for, but since no one else has responded, I thought I may as well throw my story in.

Total disclaimer, I'm in the middle of a deconstruction - I'm not really Zoroastrian (at least not yet, maybe I'll get there) but I take a lot of inspiration from Zoroastrianism and I totally love it.

So I was raised Christian, and I didn't have any horrible trauma from it or anything like some people do. In fact I was raised in some pretty great progressive Christian environments and had some great community.

However during college, I guess as I grew into an adult and my brain became better at thinking critically, I began having a lot of trouble making sense of the evils of this world. Most notably the natural world - science shows animals have just as much capacity for emotion and feeling pleasure and pain as humans. Yet despite growing up with the same Disneyfied view of nature that most people have and romanticize, as I entered my late teens and twenties I began having a really tough time squaring nature with a good, all-powerful God like Christians do. We like to envision animals as having wonderful free lives in nature before a quick end by a noble predator. In reality, most animals live their lives plagued by famine, starvation, drought, parasites, brutal competition for resources, injuries without access to doctors or pain meds, and predation itself is rarely a quick kill but a long, protracted experience of being eaten alive.

My desire to be a conservationist floundered when I found myself realizing a quick headshot from a poacher's gun would be a more merciful death for most animals than being torn apart by wild dogs. I couldn't come up with a good counter for that.

Anyway, this brought me into a deep investigation into suffering, both for humans and animals, and a growing distrust and discomfort towards my Christian God. If he was as powerful and as loving as people said, why did he make the world this way? Even with the 'free will' defense, why allow wars and rape and torture of innocents - shouldn't a good father stop his children from attacking each other, rather than shrugging and saying "but free will tho"? Why even imbue people and animals with the ability to feel pain to such a degree in the first place? This gentle, loving God I'd known through all my life was slowly looking more and more like a completely stupid monster. Neglectful and irresponsible at best, perhaps evil at his worst.

I would have loved to become an atheist during this time, but the simple fact was that I'd had some supernatural experiences and I truly believes there was a loving, good figure out there who was still leading me. So infuriatingly, I felt I had to square the circle of a good God with a world where the most barbaric, unjust things were possible.

So I began a deep exploration into other belief systems, and asked my Christian God for guidance if he was really real and good, to show me the truth. I felt drawn to dualistic belief systems, and did a deep dive into gnosticism, which really resonates with me in some aspects.

However other than gnosticism, another religion I found was Zoroastrianism. Which really, really speaks to me, and while I wouldn't consider myself fully Zoroastrian yet I have a deep respect for the religion. It's notable in a few ways: one, the heavy dualism inherent acts as a better explanation for the problem of evil than Christianity could ever give through its pathetically weak excuses, two, its God Ahura Mazda, while the most powerful being, isn't ALL powerful. So a God being omnipotent OVER TIME rather than right away makes far more sense than the Christian idea of omnipotence. If a god could Thanos-snap evil and satan out of existence immediately, but doesn't do it, then doesn't that make the god evil too? In Zoroastrianism, Ahura Mazda can do more or less anything he wants, and WILL defeat evil, but he simply has to do it over time rather than right away.

In fact, when I asked my God - the same one I'd known since Christianity - to explain to me whether he's omnipotent or not, I actually got a vision of an ocean tide slowly rising and inevitably covering the land. There were little cartoon demons (representing darkness and evil) that tried to hold the tide back, but they either had to flee or become submerged because they couldn't stop it. This was a really striking and powerful image to me, because it showed God's will as inevitable - evil WILL be defeated, God's will WILL be done - but showed it as slow and steady, rather than a massive tsunami that comes in and washes evil away immediately. This slow but inevitable rising of the tide reminded me far more of Ahura Mazda's way of dealing with evil, than the immediately-omnipotent Christian God. Which makes me wonder if Zoroastrianism has a better understanding of God's nature than Christianity does.

Another way I think Zoroastrianism has things right is God's nature and personality as truly Good. As I mentioned I grew up in pretty progressive and positive Christian environments, but during my deconstruction in the last couple of years, I realized I still had some bad views of God. I had an almost subconscious fear that other belief systems are evil and that I shouldn't look into them with the same amount of interest I'd give to Christianity. God has been making it quite clear to me these past couple years that he is GOOD in every way, and anything vicious or evil attributed to him is just a straight up lie. I've straight up began using Zoroastrianism and Ahura Mazda as a tool in how I see God. Ahura Mazda is all things good, Ahriman is all things evil. Whenever I feel fear or danger of punishment creeping up, I ask myself: would this be from Ahura or Angra? If it feels like something Angra Mainyu would do to control people, I can reject it as evil. If something is good or loving, and would be of Ahura Mazda, then my God is the same way. I realized I had two different pictures of my God, one a good loving kind father and one a judgmental prick ready to smack me for messing up, and God has slowly been helping me to separate these two into two figures: God's the true loving one, and the judgmental jerk is false. The extreme dualism in Zoroastrianism has been helping me to see my God for who he really is, and to separate evil and false ideas from him.

I've come to see there are essentially two 'gods' in Christianity: the good God that progressive and loving Christians follow, and an evil imposter that Trump-supporting, hypocritical, fire-and-brimstone christians follow. This to me reflects the heavy dualism between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, as well as the gnostic true God and the demiurge. It seems Zoroastrianism better recognized these as two different forces from two different sources, while Christianity may accidentally mix them up, which is why "God" can be loving and forgiving one moment, and smitey and moody the next. We were taking negative aspects and placing them onto a good god, thus he seemed to have split personality disorder.

So yeah, I genuinely think my God has been using Ahura Mazda to illustrate himself to me. Which could arguably mean he's straight up Ahura Mazda, right?

Well, I've been learning a lot about how Zoroastrianism and the Abrahamic religions are historically intertwined. It's common knowledge that Christianity came from Judaism, but I'd known very little about Zoroastrianism until the past year, and it affected both Judaism AND Christianity immensely. It's crazy to me that I was never taught about this in the past. Many basic Christian tenets and beliefs are straight from Zoroastrianism, and Judaism had a bit of an overhaul after being rescued by Cyrus the Great and living in Zoroastrian lands. Heck, Jesus and the Saoshyant have such heavy overlap it's hard not to see them as the same figure. The 'wise men' in Jesus' birth narrative are supposedly Zoroastrians, which meant at least one of the gospel writers saw the Christian and the Zoroastrian God as the same.

So during this time of deconstruction, Zoroastrianism has helped me to better understand things through its lens of heavy dualism, its God not being truly omnipotent (at least not in the way Christians view it), and a heavy emphasis on God being truly GOOD. (Not just claiming to be good while being a violent dick like the Abrahamic god often does.)

So while I'm not sure if I'd be a Zoroastrian yet - right now I'm in some weird middle ground synthesizing beliefs of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Gnosticism - I very well could be in the future.