If you’re like me, you probably held the notion as a young Mormon that doubt was the enemy of faith. Missionaries are to remain so insulated from anything challenging that what they read is restricted to only faith-promoting content. Our lesson manuals are to be adhered to strictly without using any non-church-approved materials. In fact, I was once taken to task as a teacher for sharing “outside” materials in a lesson about the Wentworth letter. Guess what the “outside” content was. I feel like you’re not going to be able to guess, so I’ll tell you. Yes, it was . . . [pausing for effect] . . . the Wentworth letter. The lesson in the manual was about the letter, but actually did not include the letter. I feel like I just lost IQ points retelling that event from my past experience.[1]
But why is there so much consternation about unapproved materials or encountering ideas that challenge faith? Is faith really so fragile? Isn’t life challenging? Won’t faith be challenged pretty much every time a person steps outside of his or her own bubble?
I’m reminded of the weak leaders I’ve dealt with occasionally in my decades of work life who couldn’t stand criticism and who only wanted others to agree with their ideas. That leads to some pretty poor ideas, either in terms of their merit, their workability, or the buy-in of others. Those leaders never succeed in the long-term.
There are some good reasons that faith that does not entertain doubt is the most fragile faith there is. Doubt does sometimes lead to a loss of faith–but avoiding doubt leads to a brittle sort of faith that is easily lost when challenges hit. Here’s how ignoring doubt creates fragility:
Without doubt, you’ve removed a core feedback mechanism. Doubt can function as an early warning system. Doubt tells you “something doesn’t fit” or “this explanation isn’t working” or “maybe there’s another way to look at this.” Any belief system that blocks feedback loses the ability to adapt. When doubt is suppressed, problems don’t disappear–they accumulate unseen and unaddressed. It’s like the expression “putting it on a shelf” that we hear a lot in LDS circles. Eventually, that shelf is not going to hold the weight of unexamined doubts.
It forces all or nothing thinking. The quickest way to avoid examining doubt is to tell yourself that “if any part is wrong, everything collapses,” which is unfortunately what some church leaders have advised as a way to avoid difficult issues. When a system tries to protect itself from doubt using this thinking, it becomes much more vulnerable to total collapse when doubt can no longer be avoided.
It disconnects belief from lived experience. Life is full of new experiences. When we were teens, we were often asked to write an essay (at school or at church) about how our future life would turn out. Mine is completely different than what I wrote–it’s better in many ways, and it’s more challenging in other ways. Our experiences are going to happen, and they will differ from what we expected. Experiences change our beliefs and worldview as we learn new information, develop morally, and learn from the natural contradictions in life. When faith can’t adapt to incorporate our changing views that emerge through experience, a gap grows between what we believe and what we experience. Eventually, that tension has to resolve. It usually results in an exit from the belief system that doesn’t ring true with our experiential learning or at minimum a crisis of faith or trust in the system that doesn’t serve.
It externalizes threat. This can occur when doubt is reframed as weakness, sin, corruption or an attack from outside (e.g. “outside” sources). This may create short-term in-group cohesion, but it reduces internal honesty, integrity and trust. It’s hard to be authentic when you have to pretend to believe things you don’t believe or be branded a threat.
By contrast, durable faith does the following:
Makes room for questioning. Doubt is a part of the growth process, not a failure. Questions should be explored and discussed, not hidden to avoid detection or punishment.
Allows for reinterpretation. While one’s core values remain constant, specific beliefs can evolve as new information is gained.
Separates identity from total certainty. Instead of having to say “I know” or “I am 100% sure” or phrases like “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” someone can be committed to a group or set of behaviors, even while uncertain about some of the beliefs.
Integrates experience. New information is allowed to improve and update understanding. Belief remains connected to reality, not to an idealized fantasy or an outdated imagined future.
Obviously, someone’s faith can remain intact for long periods of time if it just so happens that they avoid disconfirming information, their community reinforces their worldview (and they avoid mixing with those who do not) and their lived experience doesn’t challenge their beliefs. It’s possible to live your life with a fragile faith that goes untested and “works” for you within the limits you’ve set. But it’s far more likely to rupture if you have spent your life protecting it from any sort of doubt at all.
I was listening to an Ezra Klein podcast about the history of liberalism which has always existed in tension with more authoritarian, more dogmatic forms of human organization. The same tension that can make faith fragile through pretended strength (which is really just blocking feedback or doubt, claiming more certainty than is realistic, and casting opposing views as enemy threats) exists in other forms that we can recognize, not just in religions: in families, in governments, in nations and alliances, and in companies. While liberal or pluralist systems create more strength in the long-term through a marketplace of ideas, adaptation to new ideas, and integration of different viewpoints, they also have some short term tradeoffs that can be exploited:
- Using coalition and concensus-building through persuasion takes more time than using force, so decision-making is slower if more endurable and often better.
- There is messiness and visible conflict in the process of evaluating ideas. There are conflicts between groups that have different needs.
- There are often long periods of gridlock where nothing gets done.
Authoritarian or rigid systems avoid these negatives and often take quicker, more decisive action with speed and coordination, mobilizing quickly in a clear direction–but it’s a direction that not everyone wants (e.g. Project 2025). The downsides of this faster, more “certain” type of leadership is:
- Errors persist longer (there are no feedback mechanisms to change bad policy)
- Problems are often hidden until they are intolerable.
- Sudden disruptions occur as reality breaks through.
Ideally, a system should have a little bit of both. It should be designed to incorporate feedback, to legitimize disagreement, and to allow for course correction without losing the system’s cohesion. Any human system that cannot tolerate doubt will be more fragile than one that allows for dissenting views, whether that’s internal faith or communities.
- Do you see more people with fragile faith who protect it from questioning or do you see people who adapt as their lives change?
- Have you had a fragile faith or a more flexible one?
- Do you think the church encourages fragile uncontested faith or adaptive? Can you think of examples?
Discuss.
[1] That same bishop effectively dismantled our women-only book club by inserting himself into the book selection and requiring that we only read books printed by the church. That was basically the last time anyone showed up for that book club because it was effing boring. While it was obviously none of his business what the Relief Society book club read, there were enough sisters who felt they couldn’t buck his authority that the group just quit meeting after that.
Wheat & Tares 
Thought provoking OP.
Of course, Mormonism’s implicit message is that doubt expressed inwardly is tolerable, but doubt expressed outwardly threatens the community and is punishable (e.g., September Six, John Dehlin, et.al.).
This dynamic creates a particular crisis for intellectually engaged members. Higher education cultivates habits of critical inquiry – evaluating sources, and following evidence wherever it leads. When educated members encounter the gap between the idealized institutional narrative and the more complex historical record, the dissonance can be overwhelming.
For educated members, Mormonism’s typical pastoral responses – “pray more,” doubt your doubts,” or “some things require faith” – feels dismissive rather than authentic. When the Q15 signal that questions themselves are the problem, rational minds find the environment untenable.
Recent studies, including those by Pew Research and Jana Riess’s book “The Next Mormons”, confirm that higher education correlates with higher disaffiliation rates. Not surprising when critical thinking tools meet a tradition that prizes faith over open inquiry. I postulate that less educated Mormons tend to have fewer doubts and also suffer from MAGA tendencies. The tension between higher and lower educated members is real and statistically observable.
LD$ Inc. ownership of the Deseret News, KSL and Deseret Book also give the Church significant influence over Mormon facing media. Especially in the Moridor, this gives the Church leverage over the cultural marketplace of ideas within the community.
Essentially, we are doomed.
It’s so interesting to me how some of us used to view doubt vs. how we now view it. I used to view doubt as a weakness. I now view it as a virtue. I now view open-minded folks as the ones who are really the smartest because they are acknowledging that we really don’t know as much as we pretend. I like doubting.
Excellent OP
Some quotes on doubt:
“Doubt is not the opposite faith, certainty is. Faith and doubt go hand in hand.
Certainty is the great enemy of unity; certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith.”
– Conclave – 2024 movie
“Ubi Dubium Ibi Libertas – Where there is doubt there is liberty”
“Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty, they are courting the death of the soul, whose nature is forever churning possibility, forever seeking the larger, forever riding the melting edge of certainty’s glacier.”
– James Hollis – Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
“Doubt is a profound and effective spiritual motivation. Without doubt, no truism is transcended, no new knowledge found, no expansion of the imagination possible.”
Ideas and propositions are best when they are falsifiable; meaning, you’ll accept evidence/counterevidence that challenges said idea and change your mind in light of it. Most of Mormonism consists of unfalsifiable ideas that believers will hold onto at all costs no matter the counterevidence against them.
It should be born in mind that believers often don’t like to acknowledge the fact that fact that faith in one idea means doubt in ideas that are mutually exclusive with it. By having faith in the resurrection, you’re implicitly doubting reincarnation. By having faith that Jesus is the Son of God, you’re implicitly doubting the Muslim concept of God which holds that God has nothing associated with him, such as having a son, and that it is blasphemy to believe in such. By believing that Dallin H. Oaks is the only true and living prophet, you’re implicitly doubting that Warren Jeffs is a prophet. By having faith that God has a body of flesh and bones, you’re implicitly doubting that God is a spirit without flesh and bones. Mormon believers doubt the tenets of other religions, they just don’t like to admit it, especially in a discussion about faith and doubt with a non-believer.
Lastly, I’ll add that there are two different kinds of meanings behind faith and doubt: 1) faith/doubt in oneself and ability to overcome challenges and 2) faith/doubt in a traditional truth claims. Believers often conflate the two: to have doubt about religious truth claims means to have doubt in oneself. This is absurd. Doubting that Joseph Smith actually saw God is not the same as doubting yourself and having low self-esteem.
Mutual exclusivity carries with it a tonnage of precarious assumptions, generally based on insufficient understanding of evidence. Resurrection and reincarnation may be differing perspectives of the same phenomenon. For conceptions of God, using an analogy of water, different people may believe that God is like vapor, liquid or ice… or like cloud, steam, snow, rain, river or ocean… and perhaps not recognize the underlying unity. Same holds true even if we think about fire and water.
Through doubt, also known as inquiry, we can come to the truth of all things.
Joseph Smith taught “Mormonism is truth; and every man who embraces it feels himself at liberty to embrace every truth… The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.” (Ch. 22, Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith)
The “only true” language is problematic, tensional, perhaps yet to be resolved. Perhaps there is some nuance there that will yet unfold. As I re-read D&C 1, perhaps “only true and living church” is meant in a more inclusive way then we might typically read it. Perhaps it’s a human error. And perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a stumbling block to see if we will act with Christ’s love despite having such a phrase bouncing around in our minds. To our credit, we seem to be growing past the “only true” idea, as the last apostolic conference talk to use that language was in 2001 (that I could find in a quick search). There are many more recent talks that use some form of “true church”, but there is a vast difference between being the “only true” and being true.
bhbardo, if one holds the traditional Mormon belief system of souls and bodies, there is no room for belief in reincarnation. Consider temple work. The whole system of the temple is based around the idea that there is one soul for one body. One soul cannot inhabit multiple bodies. If Mormon teachings on resurrection are true, by extension the idea of reincarnation has to be untrue. For any investigator who believes in reincarnation to adopt Mormon belief, they would have to abandon belief in reincarnation and regard it as false.
More and more I see a sort of movement among religious people, Mormons included, that avoids calling other religious beliefs false. I’m not sure if it is rooted in fear of offending people of other faiths, or perhaps it is a sort of recognition of camaraderie against agnosticism and atheism. But it makes no sense. I often hear Mormons say that they’re just adding to the beliefs of other religions and other Christian denominations. No. They’re saying that what they teach is false. If not explicitly, then clearly implicitly. There would be no Mormonism if Joseph Smith and subsequent leaders didn’t draw lines of what was true and what was false vis-a-vis other religions.
Brad D,
I think you are ignoring the 19th and early 20th century universalist teachings within Mormonism, the Book of Mormon teaching that God inspires/grants knowledge to all peoples after the manner of their language and understanding, as well as the First Presidency’s oft-ignored proclamation of God’s love for all humankind which occurred in the late 1970s.
What if we are looking at faith and doubt from an imperfect angle? Typically, we (and obviously LDS leadership) set up faith and doubt as opposites. Indeed, the lectures on faith frame it that way. Of course, the lectures on faith also describe knowledge as the absolute in the same way that Alma describes the process of faith in Alma 32. So there is foundation there for how it is described. But I would suggest that perhaps it is an old framing, and does not quite track our modern parlance. At the end of the day, in case you don’t want to read the length of this comment below, I’d say the real issue is whether we choose to stay in our doubt (which I think is, ironically, its own distorted version of faith – faith in the doubt), or whether we choose to “stress test” it. And I don’t think the church discourages THAT.
I can’t help but think that nowadays, we would describe “doubt” as skepticism or disbelief, and faith as the actions we take to stress test both the underlying principle/belief and skepticism about it. E.g., if we were to talk about Alma’s discourse on faith on a more modern framing, it might come out something like this:
“Desire to believe” translated to open-minded skepticism. The person doesn’t believe yet, or in other words they actually lack faith, but they possess a willingness to suspend their disbelief long enough to run a test. They are saying, “I’m highly skeptical, but I’m willing to look at the data.”
“Cast it out by your unbelief” could, I think, be characterized as cynicism or cognitive bias. In modern language, this is when someone lets their preconceived doubts or negative expectations sabotage an experiment before it even has a chance to yield results.
“Resist the Spirit of the Lord” might be called today intellectual stubbornness or emotional defensiveness. It could be characterized as clinging so tightly to a doubtful mindset that the person actively blocks or rationalizes away new evidence that contradicts the existing current worldview. (and yes, I recognize allegations that this cuts both ways – and you’d be right)
“Your knowledge is perfect in that thing, and your faith is dormant” could be characterized as the end of uncertainty on that question. E.g., when a premise is proven with supporting data, it moves from a “working hypothesis” to something more established.
———–
I guess what I’m trying to say is that – to me – the issue is not whether the “church” discourages doubt. It is whether we are seeing doubt as an end of itself, or as a starting point. I would ask whether our goal, individually, is to stay in doubt or do something about it. I feel like in our era, doubt is not seen as a lack of data, but as a talisman to show to others about how edgy or enlightened we are. I think that doubt, if not coupled with a willingness to “look at the data” per my characterization above, is its own (ironic) fragile faith – clinging to the doubt with no willingness to do anything about it but focus on the doubt.
Culturally, do many members have ebbs and flows of “fragile faith” (and, since “church” is quite often our lived experience of “church”)? Certainly!!! Perhaps what Alma 32 is trying to do is not treat doubt as a sin, but rather as a lack of data. The cure for a lack of data is not to sit and wish the doubt away, but to run a practical, behavioral experiment. By acting as if the premise might be true, observing the real-world spiritual and psychological feedback, and adjusting our worldview based on those results, doubt can be updated with experiential, albeit personal, knowledge.
With that in mind, your questions:
Do you see more people with fragile faith who protect it from questioning or do you see people who adapt as their lives change?
–I think we all experience times of fragile faith and other times of adaptive faith. None of us are monoliths! We have times of openness, and times of hurt/fear/etc. that leave us fragile.
Have you had a fragile faith or a more flexible one?
–yes and yes. I think this is ongoing, over everything, at one point or another. On different principles, and even same principles as life changes and our perspective with it.
Do you think the church encourages fragile uncontested faith or adaptive? Can you think of examples?
–Yes and yes. I am confident that some leaders, past and present, at some time have encouraged things that would translate to fragile faith. And I’m also confident that if you were to look at other leaders – and, quite frankly and per my prior comment above, some of the same leaders at other times – you’d find them teaching principles that lead to adaptive faith that learns and grows. I’d argue that Alma 32’s example is one of adaptation: it is expressly telling the reader to try it out, and not just blindly accept it.
I also think that each of us sees the world a bit differently, such that what one person sees as being stuck in doubt, another sees as trying to test the premise and grow from it. And a lot of missteps when trying to interact together.
Adam, me thinks you are confusing data with dogma. Data is fatal to the faith of so many. That is why the LDS corp has suppressed it for so long, and still does to a lesser extent, while wanting to be seen as transparent.
Dogma is what promotes and maintains faith. Some, however, who understand the data, choose to remain church active because the overall experience works for them or because of their family. Do these knowledgeable individuals express their views in SS, EQ, or RS? Not if they wish to look faithful! Would I presume to present my brother with any factual data that is not faith promoting? Not if I value the relationship, which I do.
After all, “doubt your doubts”.
LoudlySublime, not sure how to answer that. I don’t think data is fatal to faith – how one interprets the data/the conclusions one reaches, warranted or not, can.
And, to be clear, when I said “look at the data,” I meant that as an encompassing term to include not simply empirical measurements, but also lived, personal experience. Which, yet again, can fall prey to how the lived experience is interpreted and what conclusions are drawn therefrom.
I guess I want to emphasize that simply framing the issue as you can either have faith, and therefore be fragile, or have doubt and thus be adaptive, strikes me as a false comparison (I said it that way to note that, as the OP frames it, there is either faith or you can be “adaptive” – not saying that you can have an adaptive faith, but rather be adaptive as though that is the opposite of faith). I think the strongest faith can result from intellectual curiosity and humility – the willingness to not only admit I don’t know the answer to something, but also to try it out instead of remain in state of inaction because of a doubt.
To your example about sharing “factual data,” I don’t think that would be the issue – it is whether it is being shared as though it is “the right answer,” as opposed to another data point to accommodate in our lived experience to seek to understand through faith, as opposed to a conclusion that cannot be refuted; which, again, is in my view its own version of fragile faith (i.e., faith in my conclusion from the “factual data”).
Brad D, I completely agree that the traditional view of resurrection seems to preclude the traditional view of reincarnation.
I wonder if those traditional views are based on inaccurate or incomplete understandings of 1) soul, 2) body, 3) oneness, 4) what it means to be resurrected, 5) what it means to have eternal life, 6) what it means to reincarnate or 7) any number of other related concepts. Given how drastically our understandings of the physical world have changed over the years, how much more tenuous are our models and conceptions of the spiritual world?
Spiritually/metaphysically, if one person goes about looking to find and shed falsenesses and another person goes about trying to find and establish truths, eventually they will get to the same place, as relief impressions of each other.
In the sense of physical beings in an earthly and social community, will we find more power in mutually exclusive falsenesses or in shared truths and diverse perspectives on those shared truths?
How much will our models, both earthly and spiritual, improve if we creatively reconcile apparent differences?
For example, where does it say that one soul cannot inhabit multiple bodies? What if this is what it means to turn the hearts of the children to the fathers/parents? What if we carry others’ souls the same way we carry others’ genes? Or a thousand other possibilities. Likely every such possibility will be inaccurate or incomplete, some will be instructive, some will be beautiful, some will lodge and root themselves within us, some will increase Charity.
Anon, I think you’re forgetting Joseph Smith’s telling of his own history, now included in the Pearl of Great Price as canonized scripture, wherein he declares that Methodism, Baptism, and Presbyterianism were all wrong. Here is verse 19 of Joseph Smith History:
“I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.'”
Mormonism is very much founded upon the idea that other religions and their teachings are false and wrong. Mormon believers have not been scared to declare it throughout most of the religion’s history. But for some reason there is a growing denial of the wrongness and falseness of other religions now.
bhbardo, “I wonder if those traditional views are based on inaccurate or incomplete understandings”
Ah, so you’re willing to say that traditional views in Mormonism are inaccurate, but not teachings in other religions? Fascinating. Mutual exclusivity in religious teachings exists. They can’t all be true and reconciled. I’d be curious to see what kind of pretzel shape your mind turns into in trying to reconcile the belief in Islam that it is blasphemy to believe that God has a Son with the central belief in Christianity that Jesus is the Son of God. There couldn’t be anything more mutually exclusive.
Brad D,
I’m asking for a more nuanced approach. Contextually, we know that Joseph Smith’s accounts of the First Vision developed over time. The wording in the PoGP comes from the 1838 account, written many years after the claimed event and during a period of intense conflict with other churches. Do you think the statement reflected the intense religious competition of the 1830s, or should it be understood as a timeless judgment on all Christianity? Could Joseph Smith’s statement mean that Christianity lacked fullness or authority, rather than meaning God rejected all Christians as well as their beliefs and practices?
Joseph Smith routinely taught because other Christian denominations and religions lacked fullness that they were full of all sorts of false teachings that had to be corrected. I.e., baptism by immersion. Baptism by another method was incorrect and wrong.
Question: do you believe that other religions have teachings that are false, wrong, and incorrect? Do you believe that other religions have a wrong concept of God? I don’t see how you could claim otherwise. It is impossible that everything is true.
Brad D,
What does “fulness” imply? That there is lack of fulness or partial or a portion of good and true in many belief systems. I would argue that humility dictates and the history of ghe LDS movement reveals continual change. Therefore, the Church has not yet approached a fullness, perfection or whatever we choose to call it.
I never claimed that everything is true or that falsehoods do not exist in every religion and ideology. I am claiming that embedded within LDS teachings there is a principle that inspiration/revelation exists for all members of the human family. There also is the old “line upon line” principle, that people can be and were/are being led to greater truths.
I would add that there is no guarantee that lds church leaders never make mistakes, no claim that the restoration has been completed, or that further light and knowledge will cease coming.
Hawk’s original post here — though tremendously articulate and well laid out — seems hardly revolutionary, yet the fact that it gets “debated” in the comments is itself quite fascinating.
Much of this is about a “vibe”. I tend to find comments that emphasize the fault lines (between LDS and other denominations) unpersuasive, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which involves our own very foundational belief in ongoing revelation and inspiration. That particular belief structure should force a certain amount of reflectiveness and doctrinal humility, if one takes it seriously.
Church members/leaders who were highly dogmatic about our collective belief in the priesthood ban were left foundering after the 1978 announcement. Folks who were invested in dogmatic explanations for differing missionary ages for boys and girls might be stumped by Pres Oakes’ recent actions. Or here’s one: I was struck by the “talk” my elderly father gave at my own mother’s graveside interment, in which he acknowledged that “really, we don’t know much of anything about the next life,” despite a lifetime of missionary zeal that emphasized our unique beliefs about said afterlife and eternal family sociality.
So I say again: much of this is about a vibe. To me the choice seems to be between an overconfidence in one’s doctrine understanding on one hand… and an openness to saying, “we’re doing the best we can, but may not have everything figured out” on the other.
Personally, I think the church would come across as far more relevant and assured if leaders didn’t seem so scared of members’ doubts and inquiry. Instructing people to not read anything that challenges their faith, or to always doubt their doubts, just comes across as a lack of confidence. Because ultimately the OP nails it here, in a long tradition that goes certainly all the way back to Socrates: the unexamined life is not worth living. And anyone who tells you that the examination should end or that you should feel settled or confident in some currently-articulated conception of a set of doctrines or beliefs….. well, that’s the thing that seems most implausible and brittle. Or to put it another way: the philosophies of men mingled with scripture.
I mean, look… If my own true blue, died in the wool, loyalist to the core, father can say: gee whiz, we don’t actually know that much about how eternal families *actually work* …. perhaps we can be a bit less strident about drawing fault lines around our doctrinal differences with others.
Anon, the Mormon Church has long promoted itself as having the fullness of the gospel. What they’ve long meant by this isn’t an acknowledgement that they know it all, but that the Mormon Church has enough knowledge, authority, and rituals for individuals to be saved, whereas other religions don’t have that. They’ve long positioned themselves as better than other religions. They’ve always acknowledged that there is more that can be learned and they’ve long acknowledged that falsehoods in other religions abound and that they are there to correct them. In other words, the leaders have long doubted the teachings in other religions that contradict theirs.
I simply don’t understand why the pushback against the obvious: that belief in Mormonism implies doubt in other religious propositions. Do you actually hold out a space in your mind that it could be true that: the Virgin Mary appears to individuals, that Muhammad is a prophet who revealed divine truths including the blasphemy of believing that Jesus is the Son of God or even God himself, that Ganesha appears to people in elephant form, that there exists a pantheon of gods, that moksha exists and our souls keep returning to inhabit other bodies until nirvana is achieved, that Warren Jeffs is a true prophet who practices the true order of plural marriage? And the list goes on. Come on, man. You know you doubt these propositions with a full force of doubt. Why can’t you admit the obvious?
I simply acknowledge that I don’t know it all. I don’t put limits on religious experience and I have great respect for various teachings within Islam, Buddhism, Stoicism, etc. Are there conflicts? Sure, but I am an adult thinker and can manage that. Doubt or conflicting concepts do not hurt me. Most of what I know of Ganesha is no stranger than the visions in the books of Revelation or Daniel.
You say nothing about Warren Jeffs. Do you hold an open space for him being a true prophet and having received revelation from God for underage girls to have sexual relations with men, sometimes incestuously?
Having convictions of ideas being right requires convictions of ideas being wrong, both factually and morally. I simply don’t buy your apparent convictionlessness. Some ideas in religions are simply wrong and mutually exclusive with things we believe.