Ron Lafferty’s theology, Gardner argued, is definitely strange, but it is not an outgrowth of schizophrenia, or some other sickness of the brain. Ron’s beliefs are rooted in things he was taught at an early age from his family and his community, just as Gardner’s own beliefs are. And although Ron’s theology amounts to “an odd set of ideas,” as Gardner phrased it, those ideas nevertheless have “a kind of cohesive coherence that is not unlike the coherence of other non-verifiable belief systems, other sorts of religions.”
