I can relate to that. When I’ve tried a full on assault to understand what exactly is going on I’ve come up empty. I don’t think that is attainable. Still there are activities which make one feel they are on the right path, and as you say there are many that can be the right one in the moment. I see you as a light along the way. 
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Greetings,
I think knowing God is still possible. You don’t need to know a bunch of facts about God, take a theological multiple choice quiz or even ultimately know all of your own beliefs prior to experience God and forgiveness. How does this happen? Prayer, repentance and silent meditation. Seeking God and being open to Him finding you.
Knowing and trusting are two different things and for me and the latter can only come through personal experience over time. I still struggle with it at times to be honest. For every person who claims God miraculously provided something for them, any skeptic worth their salt can point to 50,000 dead people or cases where God seems to not to have provided. It is easy to dismiss most reports of miracles as coincidences. Given 7 billion people that have thousands of interactions per day, of course some oddities are going to line up for a substantial number of people.
For some of us, the nature of the world makes immediate trust hard. Trust God to do what? Will he save my family if someone comes in my home with a gun to kill them? Will he save them from a drunk on the road? Will he save them if a shooter owns fire in the supermarket? Probably not and the free will defense and all the bad things that happen in the world suggest otherwise. But if I can’t rely on God to save the most important people to me, its easy for doubts to creep in. But I think trust often needs to mature over time for some of is. The apostles trusted God and several of them were martyred and died horrific deaths. Loving and trusting God does not mean he will provide what you want or that any predicaments you are in will get better. God is not a cosmic-vending machine in this regard. Trust means something more than him providing us with bread or protecting us from evil.
For me, I am as certain of God as I am certain good and evil are real things and behavior really matters. There is no conceivable transcendental or genuine meaning to morality if we are nothing more than stardust. If the universe is all there is, we are to be pitied. That we think our fleeting, blink of an eye existence in a 14 billion year old universe matters is laughable.
Also, without God good and evil don’t really exist and there is also no hope for people who didn’t get a fair shake at life (the child who was raped and murdered during a genocide). The world is just unlivable without God to me. Theism provides the only tenable worldview for me.
Also I know deep down I need repentance, I know I am not ultimately a good person worthy of praise on my own. Sure I take care of my family and help a little where I can, but this is not nearly enough. Once a person admits their sin and repents and is forgiven by God and His Grace pours over them, this experience may be all the certainty they will ever need.
My very honest $0.02
Vinnie
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I don’t read this in Luke 18:9. If I translate the Greek "“Εἶπε δὲ καὶ πρός τινας τοὺς πεποιθότας ἐφ’ ἑαυτοῖς ὅτι εἰσὶ δίκαιοι, καὶ ἐξουθενοῦντας τοὺς λοιποὺς,” I don’t get your meaning In Greek it reads that they (the Pharisees) believed themselves to be just and above everyone else, enough to wipe away everyone else, i.e., the common people. This is not about religious entitlement as applied to ordinary people. This is about elitism by those in authority positions such as the chiefs within the religious circles.
The Pharisees were about outward appearance and not about inner cleanliness and being right with God. Compared to them the tax payer is more humble. In other words it is not that they are confident in being just. It is that they saw themselves as just as an outwardly presented quality that was over and above anyone else, even to the extent of wiping away anyone else from their sights.
The Pharisees saw themselves as superior because of their position, being in control of the synagogue and turning the place of worship and religious education into a business. You bet that’s evil. This is the reason for Jesus’s scathing rebuke. You are grossly underestimating what this is about.
And the Pharisees showed their hand in being evil clearly when they joined forces with the Sadducees, the priests with whom they had been at odds, and together they conspired against Jesus and demanded his death. AND saw to it that the Romans had Jesus crucified. This is selfish reason. They were threatened by Jesus because Jesus spoke the truth and thus appealed to the masses. It took away their prestige. Jesus was opposed to appearances that was the mark of the Pharisees.
So the point is not about being confident in being just or acting justly. It is about appearances, been seen to be just when beneath the appearances the person is unjust, even evil. A person aiming to be just and having confidence that they acted justly doesn’t get that confidence out of any head trip. They get their confidence because they know that they have acted in accordance with a clean conscience. So it is not a matter of thinking oneself better than others in some arrogant way.
I am better than those who are grovelling in the gutter, prepared to stoop to any means to get their selfish ways. And I am better than them because I follow my conscience and aim to be just and righteous. This is not sinful behavior. I am not going to be punished for aiming to hit the mark of goodness and being confident that I do when my conscience confirms it.
The evil done in religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and so on, is not done because people, the common people who are part of that religion are in some way feeling entitlement. It is done when inhumane people seize high positions within the religious groups and use a manufactured charm to convey falsehoods using religious texts. They interpret as they like. And when the average person, who sees them as superior, is swayed by the rhetoric.
The harm done through religion is no different to the harm done through governments and economics. The harm is for political gain. It is politics at the heart of the matter. There is no degenerative illness that tears down our free will and the goodness within us. We, who are humane act as free agents as God has given us free will. Those who are inhumane are all part of the one corrupt mindset, what we might call “the evil spirit”. You are trying to put everyone in the same boat by claiming sin brings us all to the same place. Well, NO! Everyone is capable of committing some sins. BUT not everyone is capable of transgression. The two are vastly different places.
Those who follow God’s Path of Righteousness, though they may falter at times, are aiming for God and God sees that and embraces them.
Those, who despise God’s Path of Righteousness and do the worst transgressions deliberately and for fun, are moving away from God and indeed have no desire for God whatsoever. Those people are not God’s people. They never get rewarded. They are shunned by God.
There is no “us” as in a collective of all and sundries that will be taken in God’s hands. No way.
Aw, thanks Mark. I’m glad you hang out with us. 
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I trust God because I believe that the scriptures testify to the kind of being he is. I trust him because the father knew that his son who he loved and as pleased with would be killed and suffer and he still permitted it so that he could draw us all closer to him. His son permitted it so that he could bring us to his father. Their story is one overall of absolute love. He created a universe for us, he created scriptures for us, and he created a body of believers for us. He’s done everything someone could ask of someone.
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