Nobody could have said it better Joella. Kudos! Yes, I was kidding, sort of. I don't believe there's an ounce of intelligence, or maybe I should say common sense, in any radical. Yes, there is comfort and a sense of belonging to be found in any given belief system.
I suspect that a society without some radicals would cease to grow. I use radical in the sense of a person willing to push past the rules of his particular group when they pursue the essence of the underlying belief.
All groups stagnate under their self-constructed bureaucratic tuning. It is in the outliers that marked change comes from, not the center.