As I argued in "Beloved Son", a book about my son Brian and the subject of
religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the
methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions --
to anything -- less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven
years, left the sect he was associated with. The problem is that once the
untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy --
and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and
high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are
suprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind.
-- Steve Allen
