I have to agree with you: doubt is a gift. People who have absolute, never-asked-a-question certainty are hard to be around, and I’ll be mean enough to say that it’s because their faith is fragile: Untested, weakly fought, and probably not too different from indoctrination. Doubt allows us to wrestle. Wrestling builds muscles.

One thing I wonder as I read through writings like this: if doubt is a gift, it is not bad, right? And so we are not bad for doubting, right? So then why do I see in so many of these conversations with fellow doubters this tendency to self-deprecate (about how small our faith is, about how bad we are, and just in general). I see it a bit here, too. Is this necessary? Can we talk about doubt, or about God at all, without talking about how bad we are? Or is that necessary to talk about how good God is?