I wince sometimes when I hear people of faith proudly declare that it was their best thinking that got them to hit rock bottom. I sincerely doubt that it was their best thinking or that they were thinking at all on their way there. It is as though they are encouraging us to abandon the neural development in our crania that was the result of three million years of evolution. To me this sounds like a call to abandon my own ability to think and submit to the authority of a book, group or sponsor. I do believe that there is value in keeping my mind open to the SUGGESTIONS of the Sutras, the Bible, the Gitas or the Twelve Steps of AA. The power of holding hands in a group, submitting to a guru or checking my ideas with a sponsor, is not repulsive to me either; but, I am adamant about retaining our own ability to reason. When it is recommended that we “stay in the middle of the herd” my first reflex is to say, “Yes, but use our God-given brains to check out where that group is headed.” After all, reason tells us, staying in the middle of a group of lemmings can take us blindly over a cliff. The experience of Jones Town and Heaven’s Gate ought to have warned us of the perils of blindly following faith over reason.
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