Simone Stolzoff

And it's incredibly comforting to know that there is a protocol.

There's a series of steps that you can follow in religion.

a moment where life feels so uncertain because you've lost someone that you love.

I think religion is really good at finding those anchors for people's lives and also giving them a container to wrestle with some of those big questions and a community that can be an anchor to help absorb some of those big questions at all.

I think one distinction is between what I might call blind faith and what I might call conscious faith.

And so I think of blind faith as the mandate to believe in one particular worldview with a lack of flexibility for anything but that worldview.

Whereas conscious faith is something more like putting your heart on something, choosing to believe, but also opening your mind to coming to your own understanding of what it means to you.

Part of the appeal of organizations like cults is that they prescribe a very certain worldview.

They say, this is how the world works.

If you do these set of things, you will

become successful professionally.

You will reach enlightenment.

You will go to heaven.

You will never feel lonely ever again.

And that's incredibly alluring because that's a really deep psychological desire we have to feel certain.

It's like the song that's based on repeating patterns.

But the problem is it's easy until it isn't.

And the inflexibility of those paths

leave the individual without the agency to be able to come to their own understanding and have a sense of openness to the world as it emerges for them.

And so I'm a big fan of choosing to put your faith in something.