The real thorn in his flesh that Paul failed to recognize is one he has in common with most of his followers--a "my way or no way" approach to spirituality; his conflating of "faith" with "belief." But these are entirely different. Faith is intuitive trust in what we can never understand (i.e. God). Beliefs are the culturally conditioned mental formations we adopt to rationalize our (inherently nonrational, purely intuitive) faith. This failure, coupled with his "my way or no way" fundamentalism and religious bigotry, are responsible for the vast human suffering that Christianity (and Islam) have inflicted upon the world ever since.