Permission to Not Know

My deconstruction started when I questioned forgiveness.

If God forgives us and sent His Son to die for our sins, then why are some people condemned to hell?

I often heard that His forgiveness is conditional. We have to accept it. But that doesn’t make sense to me. I can forgive someone who never apologizes. I can even forgive someone who doesn’t believe they did anything wrong, and they will never know I forgave them. Their participation is not necessary for my forgiveness.

So why would the all-loving, flawless God’s forgiveness have conditions, when mine doesn’t?

I understand consequences. Forgiveness doesn’t make a person safe. It doesn’t rebuild trust or require you to open the door to someone who hurt you. But eternal punishment in hell raises another question. What is being accomplished when suffering has no end?

Then there is the harm that cannot be repaired.

A person can sincerely change, but they can never return what they took. They can’t give someone back their childhood. An apology does not restore a life that was taken. It does not return the years lost to abuse, even if that person becomes someone different.

That leaves me asking what justice could look like when both things are true: the damage remains, and the offender has changed. Endless punishment wouldn’t undo the damage either.

I don’t have a complete answer. That question opened into a much larger one.

So, I began looking beyond Christianity.

I learned that religions don’t all understand forgiveness, judgment, or creation in the same way.

In Jewish traditions, repentance and repairing harm are central, and some teachings describe purification after death rather than endless punishment.

Buddhist traditions explain consequences through karma, without a creator god deciding who to forgive.

Many Hindu traditions understand heaven and hell as temporary within a larger cycle of existence.

The Bahá’í Faith describes heaven and hell as spiritual conditions of nearness to or distance from God.

Islam strongly emphasizes mercy while retaining repentance and divine judgment.

None of those traditions is a single, simple answer. Each contains differences and debates. They showed me that the framework I knew wasn’t the only one people had developed.

I have always known that hell is not universally taught, but I was conditioned to believe that it is a literal place, regardless of how other religions understood it. Then I began to wonder whether the hell I had been taught about was what the biblical writers actually described. Different words, images, and passages had been brought together into something I had always understood as one clear teaching.

What do I actually believe about God? Is there a literal God?

I suspect there is something unknown, and I don’t feel like I get to decide whether to call it God. The word, the name, carries so much: a personality, intentions, expectations, rules, and a whole history of people explaining what this god wants.

I don’t know which of those descriptions, if any, are true.

I suspect the divine is within me. I keep thinking about God’s answer to Moses: ‘I AM THAT I AM.’ I don’t know whether it connects to the simple awareness I feel when I say ‘I am.’ But it makes me wonder whether the divine, if it exists, is something our names and descriptions cannot fully contain. Perhaps that awareness belongs to something larger. Maybe the divine is a potential within all of us.

Those are possibilities I am considering. I haven’t established them as facts. And they don’t answer another question I keep coming back to: where did we come from?

I am not asking about our purpose yet. I want to understand how we got here. Where, or from what, did we come?

Genesis begins with God creating the heavens and the earth. Later, the story follows Adam and Eve and their children. But when Cain fears other people might kill him, and then has a wife whose background isn’t explained, I have questions.

Genesis does say Adam had other sons and daughters. The traditional explanation is that the other people were family. But Cain’s wife isn’t specifically identified that way. The narrative doesn’t supply those details.

I have wondered whether this could have been one god’s creation story among other gods. This bible-gods version of life.

Genesis doesn’t establish that interpretation either. Still, asking made me realize how much I had assumed about what the story claimed and how it had to be read. To be frank, I was told how to read and interpret it. Some people read Genesis as a factual account of how the first humans appeared. Others read it as a story expressing ancient beliefs about humanity and God.

Other traditions had their own answers about origins.

Some Hindu philosophies understand existence through Brahman, ultimate reality. Advaita Vedanta teaches that the deepest self is ultimately identical with that reality. Other Hindu schools understand the relationship differently.

Daoist teachings describe things arising from the Dao, the underlying Way. Early Buddhist teachings speak of a cycle of birth and death whose beginning cannot be discerned. Some ancient Gnostic traditions distinguish the maker of the material world from the highest divine reality.

Ancient Mesopotamian stories describe multiple gods participating in the creation of humanity. In one Māori tradition, Tāne forms the first woman from earth, within a wider understanding of kinship between humanity and the natural world.

I can examine these teachings without deciding that one must become my answer. A belief’s resemblance to something I feel doesn’t prove it true.

That matters to me because I want evidence, too.

Human evolution has strong evidence, including fossils and genetics. Humans share DNA with other life. Evolution is still happening; inherited characteristics continue to change in populations across generations. It doesn’t require today’s apes to turn into humans. Our histories branch from shared ancestors. Yet I can not say for certain that this is how we got here.

Evolution, the universe’s development, and the origin of the first life are different questions. Science has substantial explanations for parts of that chain. Yet it doesn’t fully explain how life first arose or where the universe’s earliest state came from.

Those gaps don’t establish God. They also don’t settle every question about whether anything divine exists.

I wanted to go further back. What’s the earliest spiritual teaching we can actually find evidence for?

Intentional human burials at Qafzeh date to about 100,000 years ago. Red ochre found near the remains suggests ritual activity. It doesn’t tell us what those people believed.

Monumental structures at Göbekli Tepe date to approximately 9600–8200 BCE and are interpreted as evidence of communal ritual activity. We cannot read a surviving statement of their teachings.

Among the earliest religious compositions we can read are Sumerian hymns preserved on clay tablets from around 2600–2500 BCE. The Kesh Temple Hymn praises a temple and several deities. Egypt’s Pyramid Texts, first inscribed around the twenty-fourth century BCE, preserve another very early body of religious writing.

These discoveries establish that people practiced rituals and recorded beliefs. They don’t establish that the divine beings they described existed. The oldest surviving teaching isn’t necessarily the first teaching, either. People could speak, wonder, and pass stories down long before they could write.

I found myself frustrated that so much remained elusive. Every explanation seemed to end with another question.

Then I came across a TikTok. The creator described leaving Christianity without claiming certainty about what, if anything, exists beyond it. She spoke about experiences she couldn’t explain and the possibility of remaining open to them without naming whatever they might be.

What stayed with me was the permission to not know.

I have been searching for answers. But I needed room to be okay with not having all of the answers.

I can ask how we got here. I can take evidence seriously. I can have experiences I don’t understand without deciding they prove something supernatural. I can question the God I was taught about without pretending I have settled whether anything divine exists.

I don’t need to choose a label. And I definitely don’t need a replacement belief simply because an old one no longer fits.

Today, I accept that I don’t know. There may be something supernatural. I don’t know its qualities, whether ‘God’ is the right name, or whether it needs a name at all.

But I am curious. And I am allowed to not know.

Sources and further reading

• Genesis 4–5: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%204-5&version=NRSVUE
• Exodus 3:14: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%203:14&version=NRSVUE
• Smithsonian, Introduction to Human Evolution: https://humanorigins.si.edu/education/introduction-human-evolution
• Smithsonian, Qafzeh intentional burials: https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/burial/qafzeh-oldest-intentional-burial
• UNESCO, Göbekli Tepe: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572/
• Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, later copy of the Kesh Temple Hymn (the page describes the earliest versions, ca. 2600–2500 BCE): https://cdli.earth/cdli-tablet/190
• Oxford, English translation of the Kesh Temple Hymn: https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.4.80.2
• University of Chicago, Book of the Dead project (see the section on the Pyramid Texts of Unas, ca. 2350 BCE): https://voices.uchicago.edu/cedar/projects/
• Hindu American Foundation, beliefs and philosophical differences: https://www.hinduamerican.org/learn/hinduism-faq
• Access to Insight, Buddhist teachings on samsara: https://accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca1/samsara
• Te Ara, Māori creation traditions: https://teara.govt.nz/en/maori-creation-traditions

Video that prompted the reflection: https://www.tiktok.com/@wakemeup272/video/7697684144272248078

Originally published at https://yolikaereynolds.substack.com on October 20, 2026.