“I want everyone in the world to know!” When we have experienced something amazing and life-changing, it is natural to want everyone in the world to know. We do not care how we look, we may not even care that others may be hurt in the process. The Truth must out! But sometimes that doesn’t end well.

There is a certain irony in this, given that I am considered a heretic even among heretics. I also wonder whether I have run off to proclaim on the Internet about too many things of which I know too little, without having the required 90% of the iceberg below the surface. But still! The world needs to know this too, right? “We must say all the words that should be spoken, before they are gone forever.” Although I wish someone else would say it.

What follows is an answer I gave to a question on Quora, the moderated questions-and-answers site. I have rendered the question in italics and my answer in bold.

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Is it better to be a heretic than orthodox on religious matters?
Doesn’t being a heretic mean you had the mental and intellectual fortitude to defy commonly-accepted norms of belief (orthodoxy) in order to know God better? Orthodoxy is stagnation and conformist by definition, right?

Heresy could also mean – and I believe it often means – that you jump to conclusions based on a little experience.

You may have heard the metaphor about the blind men and the elephant. Each of them touches a different part of the elephant and comes away with his own impression of what an elephant is. This metaphor is sometimes used about different religions, or about the varieties of religious experience. But the interesting thing in our context is that a person who has never been within a continent of an elephant may still have a better understanding of it than someone who briefly touched the trunk and then ran away, his life changed forever by his personal experience of the living elephant.

When someone has a particularly intense spiritual experience or revelation, a temptation arises to reject tradition and focus on the one thing one knows with inner certainty, downplaying other aspects. But as a religion or sect acquires more members and exists over time, it inevitably grows into the same wide range of circumstances and personalities. Having rejected the old tradition, it is now tempting to fill the blank spaces with logical extensions based on the existing body of experience. But if you fill out the entire elephant with what would be logical based on the trunk, you end up with a very different animal.