Posts Tagged ‘consciousness’


Sunday, January 20th, 2013








Everywhere you look there is, well, our physical reality.

Everywhere you look there is, well, our physical reality.














t.n.s.r. bob


Sunday, December 30th, 2012


"Wheatfield with Crows" by Vincent Van Gogh

“Wheatfield with Crows” by Vincent Van Gogh











t.n.s.r. bob


Sunday, December 16th, 2012


















t.n.s.r. bob


Sunday, November 11th, 2012



















t.n.s.r. bob

SERMON: “The Challenges of Faith” by the not-so-reverend bob

Sunday, August 19th, 2012

It’s easy to believe in something greater than ourselves.  I say this understanding that it is the act of “surrender” to such an idea that marks a believer’s turning point from a “self-centered” life to one focused on God and others.  But with it being the case that: a) it is easy to believe in God, and; b) discovering a belief in God is supposed to change the direction of one’s life, why do we seem to see so little change in human behavior over all?

Now I have just breezed over at least two assertions in one paragraph that need to be addressed, the first being that it is easy to believe in something greater than ourselves (generally — God).  This can hardly be a debatable point, as we are surrounded on all sides by religious belief, whether it be traditional Christianity (in our country) or “spirituality” (a belief in more small-scale personal, invisible attendants — be they angels or our own “higher self” — or even belief in aliens or “energy”).

(The Christian may protest that he or she does not merit inclusion in the same category as those who — for example — think that Martians brought us our technology in the distant past, but I would reply that all belief in anything external to our own consciousness is the exact same phenomenon — at least on a broad scale of classification.  Yes, there are differences in belief, but there are also differences in trees, but all trees (no matter how exotic or rare) are still classified as related species of trees).

“Thou Shalt Not.” Illustration by Bob Diven.

The second assertion is more of a reference to what many “converts” experience when they find God: a shift in their awareness.  Now I suggest that a critical part of any conversion experience is the adoption of a narrative about what one has just experienced.  I like to call this “branding”, as one reason for the success of any religion (in my view) is it’s ability to re-frame any normally-occurring human experience into a confirmatory tale of their particular story.  So to one person, finding the right parking space will mean that God knew they were in a hurry and intervened on their behalf, to another it may mean that an angel led them to the right space at the right time, while another will believe that they found the right spot because their karma was good.

So despite the cosmetic (or even substantive) differences between the many forms of belief, the underlying cognitive “technology” is the same: when it comes to irrational religious belief, trees is trees.

Almost every human has experiences that we can describe as “numinous” — those moments of awareness of  something beyond our usual, day-to-day sense of consciousness — the sensation of something existing (or communicating to us) from the “outside”.

(As an artist, I can tell you that the arrival of a seemingly unbidden “inspiration” or idea can have all the qualities of a small miracle.  But the fact that these experiences have been — and continue to be — common to all artists in all times of all beliefs, makes it tough to make a case for it being anything other than the result of a creative brain’s regular activity).

At some point in our history, then, we clearly started making up stories to explain such numinous moments.  (The fact that such stories “stuck” seems a pretty good indication that the experiences that inspired them were (and are) universal — otherwise no mystic or preacher would have ever found and held an audience).  I think this storytelling is wonderfully creative of us, but it does nothing to make anything that we categorize as spiritual a reality that exists outside of our own consciousness.  One thing is clear, however: some of those stories that “stuck” have become a part of our cultural DNA.

Why and how religion began is not difficult to understand.  But why does it persist in the face of ever-mounting evidence that explains almost everything that religion once claimed to explain?  Somehow this just doesn’t matter to believers.  If religion has lost it’s explanatory power, it has by no means lost its hold on our hearts and minds.  There is a certain comfort to be had in familiarity and history, and in the face of the assault of modern knowledge, many believers abandon ground to science and simply fall back to a more reliable line of defense.  Perhaps because religious belief itself is prehistoric, the major religions — then and now — plant their flag of authenticity in their very ancientness, as if longevity automatically equaled veracity.  Of course it doesn’t (flat earth, anyone?), but the appeal of history to we short-lived humans remains viable, modern science be damned.

Like evolution itself, religions have had a long time to evolve into their present state.  And like all evolved living creatures, religions, too, surely share a common ancestor.  This is not hard to accept if for no other reason than all religions share so many traits in common.  And just like the (false) claim that evolution cannot be observed occurring, the evolution of religion — supposed to be sourced in eternal, unchanging sources — can, it turns out, also be observed.  Think about it: where and when the hell did Scientology show up?  Or Mormonism?  Or Seventh Day Advent-ism?  But note that with each attempt to establish a new “brand name” of religion, connections are almost invariably made to the past (Scientology claims we are ancient, higher beings, Mormonism ties itself to the tribes of Biblical Israel).  The most brand-spanking-new religion (though few would want to call themselves such) will claim to be a revelation of ancient knowledge.  All of this is, to me, rather telling.

Yet unlike trees (who do not seem to spend any time denying their “tree-ness”), almost every religion is constantly bending over backwards to distance themselves from every other religion.  So let’s ask the obvious question here:  “why?”  If any one of these belief systems were truly THE revelation of TRUTH from a DIVINE SOURCE, wouldn’t it stand out among the rest like a red rose in a manure pile?

Some rather diplomatically detour around this question by taking the (much more humane, I would say) approach of saying that all religions are manifestations of a single set of universal truths.  This is taking a more deistic than theistic path (and the folks that believe this way are ever so much more pleasant humans to be around than their more fanatical brethren).  But such open-minded believers are hardly the problem now, are they?

What I’m working toward here is the more committed believer: the individual who takes it all very seriously and (poor bastard) tries to make life work according the particular faith story he or she has been told.  This, of course, is where things start to break down.

For like I said, believing in something greater than ourselves is easy — in the sense that it comes quite naturally to us humans — but faith, with a capital “F”, turns out to be another kettle of (walking) fish altogether.  If people were to be completely honest about their experience, we would find that few, if any, are able to actually make their “faith” work as they were told or taught it should.

Again, the most obvious (if least-explored) answer to this is that there is nothing (no-thing) out there to believe in, which means there are no actual external, invisible agents working on our behalf.  Which means that the believer who is trying to put his or her faith into practice is, as it were, carrying both ends of the sofa up some very steep and narrow stairs (while the buddy that is believed to be on the other end carrying his half of the load is A.W.O.L).  No wonder living a Christian (or other religious) life as it is supposed to be lived is so challenging.

I have known (and know) people who make a very good go of it, nonetheless.  But those that are “successful” (in my experience) either learn to temper their expectations in order to avoid becoming completely out of sync with the reality of life, or isolate themselves in a community of like-minded believers that have little (if any) tolerance for deviation from the mutually-agreed-upon religious story they are trying to live out.

And those are the “successful” ones.  But, of course, they are not “successful” at all, because the religion they bought into simply cannot supply what it promised.  No.  In a very real way, maintaining religious faith is a ongoing project of managing disappointment.

And yet relatively few believers take the ultimate step of leaving their religion (and its impossible challenges) behind.  It could be, as Christopher Hitchens posits, that the very impossibility of living the perfect religious life is part of its appeal to us humans, as it provides some circular confirmatory evidence of our status as flawed creatures in need of such salvation from above.  I think there is merit in this notion of religion’s appeal to the fervent believer.  But every once in a while even one of those believer says “enough” and breaks ranks.  I was one of those.  (But I can tell you it took a lot of disappointments before I took that step, and even when I did — after 15 years of serious belief, and a lifetime of a casual belief in God — it was more as if God left me than I left Him: I woke up one morning in a universe absent one Supreme Being).

There is an ongoing tension among the religious between those who live their lives in a “simple” (easy) belief in the existence of God and those who are working their asses off to live (impossibly) according to whatever religious text they take as gospel.  You can hear it expressed on Christian radio any day of the week, this railing of the “true” against the “lukewarm” believers (taking here the Evangelical Christian example I know best).  I get this: the fundamentalist feels like he or she is doing all the work (like the TEA Party folks who see themselves as doing all the work while imagined “illegal-imigrant-welfare mothers” just pick up check after check from the government).

No wonder the idea of ultimate judgement in the “next” world is so appealing: all such unfairness will be redressed, and the poor believer’s thankless task of making the impossible workable will at last be rewarded.

But will it?.  There is — when it is all said and done — absolutely no evidence for the existence of anything invisible, intelligent or active outside of our own consciousnesses.  In the end, the only “evidence” we have for our faith is, well, our faith.  And the absence of any active partner in the endeavor is, I think, what makes faith itself so difficult to maintain.

t.n.s.r. bob

SERMON: “The Limits of Prayer” by the not-so-reverend bob

Sunday, July 22nd, 2012

There have been attempts at studying the efficacy of prayer.  The most famous one seemed to indicate that prayer actually made sick people feel worse.  (This seemed to be a case, though, of a sick person knowing that someone was praying for them, and — social animal that they were — feeling bad that they weren’t feeling better for the effort!  So we can’t say that it was actually the fault of the prayer itself.  The point here is that we have no evidence that prayer “works”, despite the volumes of anecdotal “proofs”).

In my Christian years I often heard the who-knows-how-far-from-first-hand reports of the dead being raised back to life, or the death sentence of a dread disease being reversed by prayer.  But despite centuries of such reports, there is still no scientific evidence to back up any of these claims.

But we still believe.  Why?  Well, we want to, we need to, and we are hard-wired to believe.

What is prayer?  To me (and for the purposes of this discussion) it is intentionally talking out loud to an external, invisible entity, generally thought of as God (though this applies equally to saints or spirit guides or what-have-you).  Prayer can take several forms: the intentional “thought” that one articulates only inside of one’s mind (hoping that the Holy Spirit will hear and pass the request up the celestial management chain); the “speaking in tongues” of the Pentacostal and Charismatic Christians; or the good-old-fashioned spoken-out-loud prayer.

Of all of these, the one form that actually “works” is the spoken-out-loud kind.

But this “prayer” works for the reasons I’ve written about before: it externalizes our intentions in such a way that they can be heard through the ears and thereby be processed by a different region of the brain.  This often produces a result: either an actual “answer” from that “part” of our consciousness, or; an idea or moment of inspiration that suggests a “solution” to whatever problem or question our prayer sought to address.

There is nothing mystical about this (though it can certainly feel magical!)  But the fact that this is a universal human phenomenon means that it has provided, I think, the basis for a raft of differing religious and spiritual beliefs about how the unseen world works.  Pretty much all of these are, I think, wrong on the facts.  (The only “unseen” world that does, in fact, appear to exist is a continuation of the physical world into a microscopic scale that we cannot observe unaided).  And yet there remains the reality of each of us humans possessing a multilayered brain that contains within it something we often experience as a second self resident within us.

This explains a lot about religious belief, and why it remains so universal among humans.  It also explains why those beliefs almost always fail to produce the results that they often promise.

If it were true that God answered even a fraction of the prayers offered to Him (to take the most prevalent idea of God) on a daily basis, then it stands to reason that we would see a lot more result in that arena.  We would actually see the occasional mountain moved, or the dead raised to life, or the cancer cured, or the best parking spaces at the mall totally taken up by cars with fish symbols glued on the bumper (I mean the Christian fish symbol, not the walking Darwin version I have on my truck).

This illustration of the “Miracle on the Hudson” circulated after this remarkable event. But where was the illustration of God’s hands letting the next airliner fall to its deadly end a week later?

The plain, cold, ugly fact is that we don’t see prayers answered in this clear, unequivocal way.  Leaving aside the dramatic,  miracle-requesting prayers (and the ever-present notable exceptions that prove the rule), even our “every day” supplications are only ever “answered” in that diffuse, heavily–interpreted manner that the equally oversold predictions of psychics or palm readers are: we look at our life through our own confirmation bias, and find a way to convince ourselves that a divine result has been made manifest.  In short, we are ever willing to cloak our disappointment in revised belief in order to sustain the most primary belief in the rightness of belief itself.

But what about the times that prayer does actually work?  By this I mean the times we ask of our mid-brain the kinds of things that it can actually do.

Well, therein lies the key: there are things that this “second self” can do that we can’t do on our own (“we” here meaning that front-line rational part of our brain).  One of these things is giving us “insight” into problems, almost as if we were bringing a second computer online to assist in processing (more accurately, we are bringing a “second mind” to work on the problem that not only has its own computing power, but a different processor, if you like).  And on this score, it is extremely helpful that this second mind is capable of communication in words and sentences (just like the other part of our brain that has the power to activate the voice box).

When I was still working within the worldview of my psychic, I tested out the power of my “higher self”, and found that it was, in fact, really good at helping me find my misplaced keys (for example).  But I also found that it could not help me find anything that someone else had moved from the place I last left it (interesting).  I also realized that it’s “power” was limited to my immediate surroundings (though I had a couple of experiences where it seemed to “draw in” the person I was thinking about — an experience that, it turns out, is not nearly so remarkable as one might think.  For it turns out that we actually live our lives in a rather narrow band of paths, places and people, to the extent that someone we might think of is actually highly likely to appear at any time!  For more on this sort of perceptual bias, see “Quirk”, “Kluge” or several of the other books on the brain reviewed on this blog).

As I think about it now, this all makes perfect sense — if the “person” I’m praying (or talking out loud) to is really another aspect of me living inside my brain.  The limitations of the phenomenon do not make sense, however, if we believe that we are really capable of communicating with spirits or a deity that is not limited to the short-range effectiveness of the supplicant’s physical senses!

The Bible has Jesus telling his disciples that they can wither a fruit tree if it pisses them off by not having any fruit (the tease!), or toss a mountain into the sea (Matthew 21:18-22).  The modern sects of Christianity that take these words at face value have built entire evangelism empires out of teaching believers how to produce such miracles in their own lives.  I’ve been to huge gatherings where just this kind of teaching took place.  Looking back on my experience, it is remarkably analogous to my later experiences of walking through casinos in Las Vegas and Reno — the “testimonies” of those for whom the technique of prayer has worked ring out like the sound of winning slot machines in a vast room.  In short (and by design) one only hears from the  winners!  (What a difference it would make if every losing machine let out a shriek of disappointment each time the little symbols did not line up!  This would give us a much more accurate picture of the reality of the casino — or the revival tent for that matter).

We humans are loaded with biases that are so persistent that they require the active involvement of the frontal lobes to see beyond them.  We will take the sight of two crossed sticks on the ground to be a message from Jesus, or an oil stain on a storage tank to be a vision of the Virgin Mary.  We naturally seek patterns in nature, a skill that has obviously served the physical survival of our primitive ancestors quite well, even though it produces a side-effect of this tendency toward irrational belief.

Natural selection doesn’t care what an organism believes about it’s own existence.  Though, in our case, it could be argued that our tendency toward belief must have given us some sort of advantage in the genetic arms race of evolution.  Still, the presence of a believing brain does not naturally imply the existence of something to believe in.  We act as if it does, and many believers are able to find confirmation of their beliefs in the natural world and, of course, in answered prayer.

But we humans are very selective in our memory, and we naturally remember the few times that prayer “worked” while failing to recall the much more numerous times when it did not.  In the same way we are always reading stories in the news (or seeing people interviewed on television) about those who survived some horror and credit their survival to their urgent prayers.  What we don’t see (and never will) are those that prayed and died anyway.  We only hear from the ones who made it through alive.

So we can go on about the airliner that made a miraculous landing on the Hudson River, say, depicting in an illustration the hands of God gently setting it down after a catastrophic loss of engine power, and yet remain silent about the commuter jet that crashed and burned with all hands only a few weeks and a few hundred miles away.  Do we really think that there was more (or better) prayer for God’s intercession on one plane than another?  (Clearly we do — it is one of the ways we rationalize to maintain our belief in prayer).

So, to sum it all up: prayer works.  But it works just the way one would expect to see a purely physical process within the multilayered human brain work.  With all of the wonder — and limitations — that such a reality would suggest.

Try it out with that knowledge in mind, and you will find out the true power of prayer.

That’s why I won’t be offended if you don’t waste any of your cognitive time praying for me.  Unless, of course, you’re the one who moved my keys from the place I left them!

t.n.s.r. bob


Sunday, June 24th, 2012






It’s always been happening inside our hominid skulls…









t.n.s.r. bob


Sunday, January 15th, 2012


The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli, 1781. Photograph: Public Domain










t.n.s.r. bob

SERMON: “The God Who is Always There” by the not-so-reverend bob

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

On one level it is impossible to say that God does not exist, even if He exists only as an idea.  For ideas have a certain presence in our world, and when ideas are shared by so many, their presence is multiplied.  But can such an idea be multiplied to the point that it becomes a self-standing reality, independent of its cognitive creators?  No.  I don’t think so.  No more than our personalities — no matter how large — can survive our own physical death.  That is the realm of metaphysics, not measurable reality.

So what are we to say, then, to the innumerable people who have had deep “personal experiences” of God and spirit: who have felt that sense of another presence at a time of crisis, or that familiar voice in our head (that is not often a voice so much as an impression, word or idea)?  And what artist or creator has not known “inspiration”, where an idea seems to arrive fully formed from out of nowhere?

Of course none of these nearly-universal experiences comes from “out of nowhere”.  So far all of the evidence of science tells us that they come from our physical brain.  And our physical brain is certainly a “somewhere”.

Because we have a multilayered brain, it can do more than one thing at a time.  And that is precisely, in fact, what it’s doing all of the time.  We don’t have to think about making our heart beat or telling our muscles to walk or grasp any more than we have to consciously manage our breathing or digestion.  It seems to “just happen”.  But we know these automatic impulses are not “just happening” at all, but are being “directed” (or ordered) by processes in our brain.  And yet that part of our brain that performs the 24/7 management of our body is hardly what we would call “conscious”.  It is the primitive “lizard” brain responding to the input of the senses and the nerves and the chemical signals that are the literal lifeblood of our self-contained organism.  Is this, then, God?

We could call it that.  But we have yet a higher level of consciousness that operates just below the conscious brain.  This is the source of our emotions and desires and the generator of our “fight or flight” response.  This is the part that hears something, or sees something, and sets off the chain reactions of adrenaline and awareness that gets us ready to run or do battle before our conscious mind even knows what’s going on.  Is this, then, our Guardian Angel?

Given the chance, we almost always go for the God in the sky.

I keep making these comparisons between the natural processes of our brains and our conceptions of spirit and the divine for a reason: because of our long history with religion, our mental/emotional default setting is to maximize any and all possibility of God working in the world, and minimize the possibility that everything that we experience of existence has a physical, earthly and/or biochemical basis.  In short, we have a natural confirmation bias toward spiritual causality.

But here’s the deal: we have so much going on within our brain that it is incredibly easy for us to project a part of ourselves outside of ourselves.  We do it all the time, and we do it quite naturally: we externalize an internal reality.

How can we do this?  Think about it: we are capable of not just our own conscious behavior, but of observing our own behavior, and commenting on it.  We can notice our selves, almost as if we were outside of ourselves watching the things we do.  That’s how we can say “I can’t believe I just said that!”, or some such.  But beyond that, we have several layers of mind always at work below the level of consciousness.  These are also parts of our “self”.  So is it really any wonder, then, that we sometimes confuse an aspect of our self for someone (or something) else?  No.  Especially if you add in the mind’s ability to identify with one part of our personality over another (meaning we will often try to make a distinction between our “true” self and an aspect of our personality or behavior that is causing us social harm).  This, I submit, is a very likely source for our ideas of the minor demons and troubling spirits that populate our religious literature and folklore.  (The major ones perhaps inspired by the more extreme manifestations of severe mental illness).

(You’ll notice, I hope, an important thing here: I am not discounting the reality of our experiences of these phenomenon.  I am only quibbling about our attribution of their actual source.)

So why is it that our first impulse is to identify any and all of these phenomenon as God?  Habit and hope.  For whatever reason, it remains much more appealing to most of us to find in everyday phenomenon evidence of an external spiritual presence.  Makes sense, actually, for animals as social as we are to not want to be alone, ever.

(There have always been those few for whom the idea of an outside presence reading their every thought is oppressive.  These are only too willing to dispense with the God idea.  But for the rest of us it’s usually problematic in some way, and it often requires some terrible experience of tragedy or disappointment to trigger a declension from faith.)

The greatest problem for the religious is not that the God that their religion is based upon doesn’t exist, but that the “God” that does exist (as a shared idea) is not the one that they suppose is actually there.  As long as the idea of God exists, however, then God, too, will exist.  But as an idea: a receptacle for our anomalous experiences of consciousness.  And those experiences will continue as long as we do.  And as far as it concerns us humans, that’s as good as eternity.

t.n.s.r. bob

SERMON: “The Center of the Universe” by the not-so-reverend bob

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

It is in the nature of the individual human consciousness to believe what another human tells it.  There really isn’t much mystery in why this should be so: we are born as completely dependent primates, squalling bundles of plastic neural pathways working like mad to make connections, sense patterns, anticipate behavior and see to it that our most basic needs for food, shelter and companionship are met.  Then (if all of that goes relatively well) we’re grown up and gradually thrust from the nest to find our way in a world much larger and more vast than the domestic one we grew up in.

No wonder we thereafter detect the hand of god (or spirit, or universal consciousness) in the events that befall us.  Of course it helps that we are generally surrounded by hundreds of other primates who are using the very same cognitive tool set to navigate their own way through existence.  “You too?” is a powerful affirmation for each of us as we continue to both coax pattern (and thereby a degree of predictability) from the physical world and cement a wide range of critical social bonds with our fellow mammals.

It is, perhaps, a bit easy to criticize the irrational, juvenile solipsism that is the basis of belief in a vast, intelligent power that has created an entire universe over billions of years  just so that we can “ask” it for a favor in the course of our day.  Though such belief does, I think, deserve criticism, I have come to feel that irrational belief is less worthy of derision (in the same way, perhaps, that we understand it is not fair to criticize an individual for attributes over which they exercise no control).

Today I’m thinking about the sheer shock of the arrival of the kind of (apparently, still) unique consciousness that we humans possess.  Imagine a chimpanzee waking up tomorrow suddenly able to express herself in words, sentences and paragraphs, able to build structures, convert raw elements into chemicals and useful drugs, distill whiskey, compose music, drive cars, make laws and punish lawbreakers with civil justice (no more need to tear intruders to death with their own canines).  Then add to that the moment of realization that she is able to step beyond the immediate concerns of survival and consider the fact of her own existence.

Naturally, we humans didn’t come to such a “moment” in a flash.  Yet there had to some actual moments among one, then two, then hundreds of our ancestors that just about blew their mammal minds.  As in physical evolution, such “moments” probably occurred millions of times and went no further.  And, as in nature, eventually the right “moment” occurred under the right conditions and the humans who “thought” differently we the ones that won the lottery of natural selection and, well, here we are.

(The Neanderthals had it in spades.  Other, earlier branches of our hominid tree surely had it as well, but we are the ones that made it through the gauntlet of life.  That is pretty amazing).

And that is one of the things that I keep coming back to regarding belief in a higher intelligent force active in the universe.  For I’ll confess that my brain continues to seek opportunity to make sense of the universe, and one of the tools it will (perhaps until I die) bring to bear is the question of whether I am “right” about there being no god.

We are stardust. Photo copyright Russell Croman.

In my case there are two characteristics of my mammal brain at work here (I think): the one being the critical, analytical part that is constantly scanning for incorrect, useless or even dangerous knowledge to “delete” from my existential toolkit; the other being my profoundly social primate nature that is ever trying to find connection with my fellow monkeys (which, in our contemporary social structure represents a much wider population then our ancestors had to deal with — hence I also try to find common ground with my entire “nation”, for instance).

When I am confronted with this dual critical/social challenge to my confidence that god isn’t “out there”, I feel a familiar pang of anxiety that is equal parts fear of being “wrong” (which is a primal threat to my social standing), and a fear of annihilation before an implacable and all-powerful deity (if that deity turns out to be as advertised by most monotheists).  But instead of directly attacking this fear (which, it could be argued, only re-enforces the “power” of the idea), I end up sort of waiting for the next thought to come, which is generally a recollection of some fact gleaned from our study of nature or the universe or biology that will, in it’s quiet way, simply dispel the wisp of smoke that is the notion of god (when that notion is properly placed against the vast reality of space, nature and biology).

Others have put this better than I (Hitchens, Dawkins), but when we take in the actual cosmic perspective, we are faced with the notion that an intelligent actor created an inconceivably vast universe some 13.5 billion years ago, and used the nuclear furnaces of stars to create the carbon and oxygen and metals and elements that were then blown back out into the void by the violent death of those stars and then made available to a small planet such as ours which, a couple billion years later, managed to foment its own chemical reactions that, over hundreds of millions of years, evolved a vast array of complex, multicellular creatures, one of which became us.  Then, after millions more years of evolution, life, death and struggle for existence against the forces of natural selection (where 99% of every species that ever lived had already gone extinct), this intelligence chose the deserts of the Middle East, some three thousand years ago, to reveal himself to a bronze-age people as a God that required that humans (alone among the teeming multitudes of living creatures) to be careful about what foods they ate on what days, so as not to enrage this God to the point where he might fling his beloved creatures back into the void he had been overseeing (in every detail, and in order to have just this opportunity) for over thirteen billion years.

In the face of such a perspective, the idea of religion seems not that far above primate level thinking, frankly — as if it were something that a chimp could adopt without that much of an advance in it’s cognitive ability.  But then, to me, that makes absolute sense.  For we are, at our core, thinking monkeys.  And this is one of those ideas can be taken as an insult or a compliment, depending on how you look at it.  I think it provides a balancing to our solipsism and hubris by putting us in our natural context (when we need such a countervailing critical force).  But it also reveals to us just how remarkable our evolution to the pinnacle of consciousness is.  For no matter how you slice it, there is no other animal on the planet that thinks like we do. That “achievement” must rank among the most amazing unintended consequences of evolution that there has ever been.  (Though admittedly not by any completely objective standard — hence our continuous debate about whether we humans and our technical advances have, on the whole, been “good” for the planet — but impressive and worthy of note, nonetheless).

We are remarkable creatures.  Of course we are fascinating only to us, as no other animal in the universe is actually capable of “caring” about what we’re up to.  And perhaps that is another part of why we “need” god: as an extension of our human need to hear a heart-warming “Me too!” affirmation from another consciousness like our own.  For we warm to advice from others with an innate belief (or hope) that their experience is slightly better informed than our own and, therefore, helpful.  In the end that bit of encouragement, alone, is often the most useful part of such human interactions.  And so we quite naturally want to hear the same from the god (or gods) we create.

But maybe we have that already, all around us, even if it’s not in the more personal form we desire.  For we are a part of everything that is.  We are truly built of stardust: of carbon and oxygen and minerals formed in millions of star furnaces; our bodies drawn from the collection of cosmic dust that coalesced into our planet.  We live lives powered by our own nuclear furnace sun.  In a sense, the universe might as well be all about us, for it has bred us, borne and feeds us.  We just can’t expect it to say so any more than it already does.

t.n.s.r. bob