I've been thinking about this a lot, and I want to offer a thought for what it is owrth.

It seems to me that in any population or congregation of people you will find a small number in the far reaches of madness, and a gradually increasing number in the zones of more and more sane. The largest number will be middling sane, perhaps occasioanlly mad but keeping to an average temperament. They will not be totally reactive but will have creatiesparks form time to time. They will tend to filter things for the better, trying to be kind and as wise as they can given their culture. A smaller number will be wiser and more sane still, seeking insight and integrating information at an above average clip. A small number will be highly aware, insightful, creative, balanced and whole under all conditions.

In other words, sanity is probably distributed in a bell-curve.

I suggest that the degree of other-determination versus self-determination follows the same curve. The lowest on the sanity scale are probably the most plagued with externally defined world views which they are not permitted or able to weigh against their own observations. The large clump in the middle have a mix of prescribed data and personally observed data and occasionally even create their own data. They are sort of balanced between inherited and other-determined or authoritarian systems of viewing things, and their own free perspectives.

On the right end, a smaller population are highly certain of what they have seen, compare received viewpoints against their own certainty and reject what makes no sense, seek new viewpoints and entertain new ways of seeing things but are not afraid to let go of any data that doesn't add up, and create new data if they find they are having new experiences beyond the usual vocabulary.

At any point on these parallel curves of distribution you can get al kinds of noise of people asserting rightness, demanding compliance, presenting screeds of researched blather about all the significance, and so on. But that is just as true of the most insane views as it is of the most sane. So large amounts of assertive literature doesn't really say much about one or another.

But I do thing that the truest and most transcendent religious perceptions come from the rare individuals who are furthest along that bell curve to the right.

Almost everything to the left of that zone is largely sound and fury, and while it may result in mayhem (because it is being dramatized and acted out) it will not, in fact result in Truth in the Platonic or transcendental sense. This implies that (a) a small number of highly sane people may be capable of religious insight which is genuinely helpful, truthful, transcendental and genuine and (b) a large number of variously less sane people will have a much larger number of altered, twisted, authoritarian, oppressive or even destructive religious-sounding perspectives which do not contribute to human well-being or understanding no matter how loudly they are asserted.

I do hope this makes some degree of sense.

A