The way that Buddhist traditions and ideas have filtered into Western popular culture are sometime completely erroneous, oversimplified, or embellished. I have certain questions about Buddhist practices but I fear that my questions may be founded on such incorrect assumptions about Buddhism in the first place.
The obvious answer to this is to research Buddhism online or through books but even then I run into issues distinguishing popular websites/books from ones that are more true to source material. The ones that are more true to source material often lead to a complex investigation of topics and I find myself learning about Buddhism in a very scholarly way - something I would like to do one day but cannot commit myself to right now. This issue is part of the larger problem that since I do not know what I don't know it is very difficult for me to know when a question I have is legitimate or not. If I were to use Buddhism.SE I would have to ask a lot of questions in the form of: "Is it true that Buddhism entails X" which seems inefficient.
Previously, I gave a disclaimer at the top of my question indicating my potential ignorance. However, with my new question I am afraid it may be quite controversial and I fear asking it if I'm incorrect about some of my underlying assumptions. What would be the best way to ask such a question? Is this kind of a question inappropriate for this StackExchange site?
If you would like to know my question or more information please let me know. I just wasn't sure if it was appropriate to post my question directly on the meta.