The li'l baby jesus freaks are in a murderous funk. The Fox Sports Network refused to show a Christian commercial during the Super Bowl. It was called a "John 3:16 ad" and was a take off on all those moronic signs you see idiots holding up at sports events. Some evangelical kommando is behind the signs and the ad and it is pouting about the other ads which were allowed: girls in skimpy attire selling beer, trailers for mega-violent movies, and ads for various other products which it finds too liberal or too Modern or just too secular. As if Football was too sacred to profane with such worldly solicitations. Fox hid behind this logic: if it aired a Pro-Religion ad it would then have to air an ad which was either anti-religious or even out & out Atheistic. So it was their Christian duty to keep those godless ads off our Screens during the most watched Television event in all of Monkey History. Both Geschichte und Heilsgeschichte. I like the logic behind that reasoning. If we kill god doesn't the devil die with him?
Jesse Bering, in his book: The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life - asks the only real question: Why do so many people believe in god? The New Republic calls the book: "an uncommonly compelling case for the self-loathing of humanity." Ouch! Bering is an Evolutionary Psychologist so he rejects the common wisdom that god and his religions are the result of being "maliciously hammered into the heads of the innocent young," and instead are Innate predispositions to find Agents in the back of Events. "Theism stems ... from a cluster of brain adaptations that lead to cognitive biases and illusions." These Delusions are not Irrational - not at base anyway - they make perfect sense from an Evolutionary Perspective. God, Religion, belief in the Supernatural all stem from the same root: We are the Talking Monkey. We have Language and that dangerous medium gives us the "think beyond our immediate surroundings" in both a literal and a figurative sense. Language gives us the power to think about things which are not there. It also helps the Monkey form his Mind's most prescient insight: The Theory of Mind. The power to think about what others think. And this means: their Intentions.
As the Kirkus Review put it: "We conceptualize the unobservable mental states of others and reason about what they see, know, feel and believe." The Theory of Mind - or ToM - puts us in the other's head. Even if that were the head of god. It is our ToM, reinforced and support by our Language ability, which projects Minds into the Others and - inevitably - into things which are completely Mindless, like a storm, or Non-Existent - like god. The Monkey is a Prisoner of Teleo-Functional Reasoning. We flood the Universe with Cause/Effect reasoning governed by Actors or Agents. Someone or something, we reason, is behind the curtain and pulling strings. Bering calls this "an insuppressible eruption of our innate human minds." We face the world as if it is a complex of things with "a preconceived purpose, from the soul to signs in nature, and are put on earth to solve human problems and for human use, [all of this] perceived as evidence of a designing hand at work, some supernatural agent behind tornadoes, volcanoes, human destiny, the flight of birds, etc." This adds up to a belief instinct, a Darwinian drive for explanation as the greater adaptive response."
"The Illusion of God," Bering writes, "engendered by our Theory of Mind, was one very important solution to the adaptive problem of human gossip." In Group settings and situations - which for us are better for survival - having a bad reputation would inevitably diminish your reproductive chances. But, if the Monkey had a mechanism which projected the Eye & Mind of God onto everything then you would know that god was watching you. And judging. Because that's what minds do: they watch and judge. Morality, like god, has been constructed around the Mind's default Perspective: Games Theory. Winners flower; cheaters and losers are cast off and away. Language allows us to report the behavior - and the perceived intentions - of others. Even long after the event. Your social position and Reproductive Status depend on how the others "see" you. You must guard your reputation to survive. So believing in a Supernatural Agent who was constantly monitoring and judging everyone and their actions would encourage the Monkeys to avoid "immoral impulses" and survive.
“Is the idea of God an invention maliciously hammered into the heads of the innocent young, or is it innate? Bering, an evolutionary psychologist, thinks the latter. Theism stems, he writes, from a cluster of brain adaptations that lead to cognitive biases and illusions. Useful abilities – such as our theory of mind, our ‘person-permanence thinking’, or our perception of patterns and causes – work not wisely but too well, so that we intuit a big watcher, an engineer of coincidence (‘encrypting information in … events’), a guarantor of immortality, or a designer of our life's purpose. God, in sum, is a ‘sort of scratch on our psychological lenses’, hard to get rid of completely. Disarmingly, Bering tells stories of his own superstitious moments, and references to Sartre and Gide add a patina of literary class.” A sort of scratch on our psychological lenses. The New Scientist calls the book: a "nuanced but convincing argument for atheism."

Spinoza would love the Irony. The Science that he pioneered has triumphed and has now declared that while God does not Exist we need him to. God is Necessary. We need him to watch everything and judge it. We need him to reward his faithful and punish the infidels. Our reputations depend on it. Our Theory of Mind is based on it. God helps his Chosen People get Laid and prosper. So, in the end, God is either an aphrodisiac or he's like your best buddy who drives around while you get fucked in the back seat. Bering too did a bunch of experiments with children. One of which showed that older children are more likely to be superstitious. Kinder 6 to 7 years old "see hidden messages in events for which those 3 to 4 years old find only rational explanations." Skippy has been arguing the subtext of all of this for years: Language is an Organ of Perception. It creates the world from the way the child attempts to view the world. The blowback of being able to ponder absent agents and events both in the here and now and in the past as well as the future is license enough to create absent worlds themselves. Symbols lead to Symbolizing. Abstractions are the result. Whether or not they Exist. Language makes Psychosis Possible and that means Inevitable. We are doomed to constructing Castles in the Air because we can. And we do it all transparently and unconsciously. We don't realize that they are only Castles in the Air until we try to live in them. The Poet Coleridge writes about his collaboration with Wordsworth on producing group poetry: ”... It was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us ...” That "Willing suspension of disbelief" - like the Theory of Minds is both expositor and co-creator of the phantom worlds of our imaginations and their gods and religions.
Do you remember that classic French flic from 1956 called Le Ballon Rouge? A 5 year old schoolboy in Paris is seemingly "befriended" by a Red Balloon which is dancing and darting from place to place as if it had a purpose beyond the whims of wind. The boy is enchanted by his new friend and together the two set out on magnificent adventures in a working-class faubourg. Around them the adults go about the grey bidnez of the everyday absolutely heedless of the miracle in front of them - a boy and his angel, the Red Balloon. Reality breaks in. A mob of infidel children who cannot see the soul in the balloon chase the two and eventually corner them and stone the balloon to death - until it pops. If you liked that movie and those things like it - then, as Bering says - you have just proved to yourself the Theory of Mind. It was your "willing suspension of disbelief" which gave that Balloon the right to have a Soul and a Mind. It was your Theory of Mind that recognized and translated the Balloon's Intentions. Every time you watch the Simpsons or Kenny getting killed on South Park, you exercise your god muscle. We give mental innards to things which have no innards at all. You can hear Spinoza giggling like a Jap school girl. We cast our Perspectives and they Create us Autofiguratively. Man is a creature composed of body and soul and made to the image and likeness of god. While god is a creature composed of body and soul and made to the image and likeness of man. The feedback loop is inevitable because it is Necessary. That's what the little jew saw when he lifted god's last veil - not god's center, her pussy, but instead - the Monkey's Mind. Only the monkey's mind.
The year that poor Skippy was born the American Journal of Psychology published a study by Austrian researchers Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel. The 3 Nazi Scientists made a very simple little movie which was composed of 3 characters: a large triangle, a small triangle, and a small circle. The 3 characters were in constant motion. Click on this and take a moment to see the flick. Participants in the study watched the film for awhile and then they were prompted to describe what they had seen. The big triangle, they said, was bullying the little one and both of those horny triangles were going after the virgin female circle. But most said that the little girl circle was at home and when she went out a big Triangle tried to have his way with her but that a smaller triangle had come to her rescue and fended the big bully off while the chick-circle got back in her nest. Then the little triangle entered her nest and was both guarding her and waiting for his reward. Some said that since the little triangle and the circle were touching at the end that they had merged. I feel like hanging around to see if the little angle has a cigarette. What we are discussing is called the Attribution of Causality. Predicting the behavior of others around us is necessary for survival. Roland Barthes said it all in one line: Nothing is Natural; Everything is Discourse. We are Narrative Animals - and remember, that's one of the reasons that Still Life Paintings sometimes freak us out. They have no Narrative thread - they are not telling a story so they make us make one up for them. All Art is dependent on and a slave to our Theory of Mind. And so is all Reality. So where in this is god?
Animism is the old name. My pay-extra dictionary defines Animism as "the attribution of conscious life and a discrete indwelling spirit to every material form of reality (as to such objects as plants and stones and to such natural phenomena as thunderstorms and earthquakes) often including belief in the continued existence of individual disembodied spirits capable of exercising a benignant or malignant influence." It's the oldest form of religious activity on earth. Sir James Frazer found that the Monkey has had essentially 4 belief systems in his long tenure: Animism, Magic, Religion, and Science. So the Monkey has lived long enough to see his first belief system rebranded and polished up as the "Theory of Mind." Jorge Luis Borges, in his brilliant short story "The Theologians," says: "Every man is an organ projected by the deity in order to perceive the world." So the Monkey turns out to be god's ToM - his Theory of Mind.
We are god's way of knowing about himself in the same way that a "Physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms." Clever stuff, but ultimately it begs the question. Is there any separation between god and his universe, between god and man. If there is not then in what way can we say that such a thing as god actually exists. If the Universe is Perfect why would you need him?
"After all," Bering writes, "once we scrub away all the theological bric-a-brac and pluck the exotic cross-cultural plumage of religious beliefs from all over the world, once we get under god's skin, isn't he really just another mind - one with emotions, beliefs, knowledge, understanding, and, perhaps above all else, intentions? Aren't Theologians really just playing the role of god's translators, and isn't every holy book ever written a detailed psychoanalysis of god?" The map next to this shows the percentage of religious belief in Europa. Roll over it and grok the differences in a "like-minded" map of American religious belief. They say it takes a generation for Euro-Notions to blanket America and as Bob Dylan said: "It's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there." SLATE sums Bering's book: "But this notion of God as an illusion is a radical and, some would say, even dangerous idea because it raises important questions about whether God is an autonomous, independent agent that lives outside human brain cells, or instead a phantom cast out upon the world by our species' own peculiarly evolved theory of mind. Since the human brain, like any physical organ, is a product of evolution, and since natural selection works without recourse to intelligent forethought, this mental apparatus of ours evolved to think about God quite without need of the latter's consultation, let alone His being real." Let alone.
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