Well I certainly hope to be as sure of that as possible, and do what I can to 'look beyond myself', but I won't pretend to do it any better than the next person

Well I certainly hope to be as sure of that as possible, and do what I can to 'look beyond myself', but I won't pretend to do it any better than the next person. I think humility is the key there. The second you become convinced your convictions aren't harming anyone, you've developed a conviction that may lead you to harm someone :]. Take conversion therapy for example. My understanding is that many, if not most, proponents of sexuality-focused conversion therapy truly believe that it is not only not harmful, but in fact directly beneficial to its subjects, for a variety of (mostly religious) reasons. I suspect the agony felt by the people subjected to such things is seen not as so much as harm by the people promoting it, but more as the pinch felt from a vaccine shot: a momentary sting in service of an eternal afterlife of painless happiness and purity. Of course there's tons of predatory money to be made in the business of religion, and it's likely that most of today's religious bigwigs dgaf about anyone's eternal salvation, but that's due to a separate set of convictions.