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Moreover, formal religious influences have generally left these underlying formations of personality untouched.  Religious behavior has taken the form of the personality disorder more often than religious experience has wrought a deep change in the patterns of this disorder.  In short, the person’s basic way of life continues as it was.  The mass approaches to religion, as well as the mass approaches to the rest of the education of the individual, lacked the power of personal confrontation, the concern with transformation, or the wisdom needed to discern that anything was really out of the ordinary.

Behind the Masks, Wayne E. Oates