I don't know about you, but I use philosophy mainly as a way of emptying my head. I like to come to a point where I can say, this is this, that is that, and that's it.

I'm hopeful, concerning religion, that this will be the final thread I will ever need to start on the subject. Ooh - momentousness.

Stage 0: Hokay. Off we go. At the moment the patient is in fine mental health, completely free of conceptualizations not firmly rooted in perception, repetition or experience. They are however, in a moderate state of fear, and a high state of curiousity. Both conditions caused by a deficientcy of that most important of metaphysic vitamins - Vitamin K. Also known as knowledge.

And it is this chink in our metaphysic armour that allows infection.

Time for the most classic of causitive questions, and the most intuitive for a species of conscious tool-makers - "What made the world/us/everything..?"



So if we assess the three answers: Answer three is depressing - the intuitive "There must be a maker" is not only left unanswered, but even the hope of a possible future answer is negated, satisfying neither curiousity nor opening the subject to further questions. Answer two, while honest, leaves both the questioner and the answerer dissatisfied. Answer three - the supernatural answer - while having no physic component, is satisfying to the answerer - he has shown himself to have "known something" impressive - and satisfying to the questioner in that it provides a causitive object, and opens the subject to further questioning concerning the details.

Stage 1: Both patients Q (the questioner) and A (the answerer) have a mild case of the Supernaturals. It is to be noted however, that it is patient A that has the more severe form, because he also has the motive to preserve his, as yet temporary, status of "knowing more shit than Q" by being able to elaborate.

Barring the varibles - he/she/it/they have X powers, look like Y, made us and everything else with/by doing Z - the second most burning question is: "What does this force think about me..? because, let's face it, you don't want to worry about having anything that powerful gunning for your ass. ie. the supernatural force answer is never satisfying without the follow up of personal relation.



btw. From now on I'm just gonna say 'god' and use it to stand for any supernatural creator/pantheon/force.

I also want you to imagine that the answers to these questions are competing for the hearer's belief, competing for space inside his head, and remember, as I said before, it is the feel-good-factor that is the primal criteria, along with a bit of "internal consistancy would be nice".

I think you can guess which answer would win out.

Stage 2: Both patients Q and A, have a moderate case of the Supernaturals. In both cases, personal feelings of security and status/self-worth respectively have been hijacked by the disease. As yet however, the disease is purely a creature of mind, and has yet to manifest itself in behavioural terms. At this stage, the disease will either eventually stabilize into a reasonably benign social symbiont - of the 'nothing, he just is' variety - or mutate into a more dangerous and compelling phenotype: an interactive form, with apparent effect in the real world.

Mankind's second urge, after learning the intrinsic properties of something new, is to wonder about how to use it. Sticks get picked up, swished about a bit, and after the essential stickness has been explored, get turned into tools. Leading to question three.



The question of "what is god actually good for" is one seldom explored perhaps. Another is why should the rituals involved in securing divine intervention be so elaborate..?

"God, pass the salt please."
...
"Hey, c'mon, Jesus fucking christ, it's just over there, get your ass in gear already."
...
"A !!! A !!! that god you told me about won't pass me the salt..! Aaaayyyy!!!"

Okay, so most people didn't have salt-shakers in those days. But that aside, what's A gonna say..? After all, if god created the world and everything, proverbially passing the salt should be... er, easy. What does A have to invent to preserve god's integrity..? A couple of things:

a) A scale of things that it's okay to ask god to do for you. And excuses as to why, sometimes, god still doesn't bother even then.
b) Some reason why god is too busy to do the mundane everyday shit anyway.

Now, poor ol' A racks his brain. There are two ways to do (a). One way is to make the things god is willing to do for you so big, that the likelihood of a situation arising in which you actually qualify for god's help is so low that you won't be constantly hanging off A's poor ass about why god didn't turn up and do the biz (yet again). Life and death situations are particularly good for this, afterall, when god doesn't save you, you aren't around to complain about it to your local ever-lovin' A. Or if you lose a war, then you're too busy being killed/raped/enslaved to ask, and even then, someone will just say "their god was more powerful than ours" to which you'll be obliged to answer "Oh good, so it wasn't that we are just lousy at fighting then."

However, that's not quite good enough for life/death scenarios where someone (not in danger) is trying to secure divine intervention for another. The classic sick child. That, for any amateur theologian, trying to sell a new and shiny god-concept is a real bugger.

Which leads us to the other way to do (a). Ritual.



The making of elaborate, or costly, rituals solves two problems neatly. Number one, when nothing happens, the blame can be shifted from god, onto the people doing the ritual.

"You call that a sacrifice bozo..?"
"Nooo - I said West you idiot WEST !!!"
"That candle doesn't have real child's blood in it, does it."

Basically, the situation gets messed about until, if the whole divine intervention thing does work - then God did it, and if it doesn't - you fucked up. A neat little catch 22.

And number two, if it takes half an hour to even draw the magic circle, you're most likely to walk around the table and pass yourself the salt.

[that's enough for today I think To be continuarized]

To counter the problem of (b) 'why God seems always too busy to do house calls', A usually cooks up a varient of one of two answers, very probably depending the social type of the people he's dealing with. If the people are warlike, then God will very probably be busy fighting off ice giants alongside the spirits of dead warriors or something, and if the people are more sedentary, then God is more likely to be busy making sure the world stays shipshape, pushing up the sun every morning, making the crops grow on time, bringing the rain, all respectable pursuits.

It is at this point, with the idea of God the tool successfully absorbed into the group psyche that Q and A themselves begin to mutate under the influence of the infection.

Stage 3: Division. Under the spreading social tentacles of the disease, Q mutates from being a simple passive quester after knowledge into an active participant in the nascent reliigon - P the petitioner, and A grows from being the simple expounder of that sought-for knowledge into an expert in its practice - R the ritualizer.

Here perhaps an analogy must be drawn to modern times. The stockbroker. To an outsider, the stockmarket is a great big, almost supernaturally complex system, but, alluringly, also one that sometimes produces vast dividends. And who are its high-priests..? You got it. Their speciality is to convince their petitioners (after first convincing themselves ) that they know what they are doing. In reality, the stockmarket is pretty much wholly random. A duck on a keyboard buying and selling with the haphazard peck of its beak will - and this must be stressed - in the long run do just as well as any economist with a bunch of degrees, masters and doctorates and a killer, never-fail, fully-formularised investment system.

Of course, just try telling anyone that. (My advice - don't - just buy them a copy of 'Black Swan' and watch their preconceptions crumble ).

Anyway - The aformentioned Catch22 of "screwing up the ritual" opens up a new niche in the host society - that of the 'expert ritual conductor', the ritualizer. In the same way that me 'constantly buying the wrong shares', and yet seeing others all around reaping the rewards of sound investments, will tend to push me into declaring myself an idiot and seeking 'expert' help in the form of an economist - my seeming inability to get god to divinely intervene on my behalf while all around me I hear of, and perhaps even see, other people's children miraculously recovering from illnesses that killed mine, or harvesting bumper crops while I'm left with a field full of withered, bug-blighed stems... Will lead me to seek an expert in ritual.

Hope in times of desperation has a terrible power. Against it, reason does not stand a chance.

For example. Remember the sick child we talked about..? Poor kid. Only now, it's not just any sick child - it's your sick child - and he's just burning up with fever. The drugs the doc. gave you..? They're not working. The luke warm baths..? The cooling compresses..? They just seem to drive the fire inward, ready to burst out again five minutes later. That little guy. He can't keep food down, he can't even keep water down. The bones in his cheeks are pressing upward through the skin, a little further every day. He's as white as a sheet, and yet, he still trusts you. He knows you'll look after him, knows you'll take care of him, make him better, make him well. He has faith. He looks at you, and tries to smile, just a little.

But you've tried everything - there's nothing left that you can do. Except watch.

Watch...

... and pray..?

And this is another reason why religious ceremonies seem to evolve into ever more intricate forms, conducted in strange languages, by weird guys in bizzare costumes inside dedicated structures. It is because once a specialized ritualizer-caste takes off, it is in its interest to put the rituals ever further out of the reach of the average petitioner because intervening with god is where their bread and butter comes from. They mine the deep seams of hope that run through humanity. They are spiritual car-dealers, sacred middle men, brokering deals with god.

ie. the more bizzare and complex the ritual, the less likely the petitioner is to say "well screw this for a game of soldiers" and do a little spiritual DIY all on his lonesome.

More to follow.

So, a quick re-cap, we've gone from nothing, to explanitory superstition, to ritualized interactive religion, to social division into believer and proto-priesthood, all in the twinkling of an angel's eye, without there actually needing to be an angel, or a god for that matter.

Before we go much further, we'd better consider an obvious question we've missed:



Taking for granted that A/R is too emeshed in his own role to ever allow answer three to escape his lips, whether or not he answers in the form of one or two depends on his social context. To make it very simple: if he's just some poor nobody, he'll probably go for the prophet varient, and rely on his personal charm/persuasiveness/charisma to carry him through (though the 'son of god the poor carpenter' is an obvious exception), but if he's already powerful in the material/military sense, and has no serious competition, then option two is not out of the question. Becoming a god-king is every schoolboy's dream.

I'd argue though, the 'god's speaker' varient is the one that comes first in the sequence. For two reasons.

1) The monkeysphere. Religion is of critical importance to overcome the limitations on coherrent group size that the monkeysphere imposes. To have godkings, you first need a reasonable sized kingdom to rule. Initially, at the birth of religions, no-one would have suffiecient power to push a godking gambit through without getting laughed at and clipped round the ear for being a smartarse.
2) Religion creates the opportunity for a second power block to rise in society. An already ruling body would have no real motivation to support and further a fledgling religion since a) they already have power, so don't really need religion as anything other than decoration, and b) they would probably understand that eventually, that same religion, with an attendant (and supernaturally more powerful than them) god, would come to threaten their existing, purely materially-based power, or at least force compromises.

Anyway - this leads us onto stage 4: Dependence.

monkeysphere. trust. laws. god the policeman. god the mason. Loss aversion. Hunger for power.

This is getting all out of sequence.

Let us know when you think you're done. I don't want to say anything till you're finished.

I'm with jtt. I am just waiting......

ok, are we there yet?


ok, are we there yet?

ok, are we there yet?

ok, are we there yet?



Kropotkin

ok, are we there yet?

Sorry, I just recieved a bunch of weird Japanese comedy/horror films via Amazon. So far, "Battle Royale" was very good, and "big man japan" was fucking terrible. Two more to go...



A brief respite from religion.

"Versus". Wanted to be the jap version of highlander, fell short. So-so, repetetive, but quite funny.

"The good the bad and the weird" eh. Better produced, a jap take on the famous western but set in manchuria. kinda okay. I fell asleep and missed about a half hour. never a good sign, it was about 2am in the morning however, so I'll give it another go.



Battle royale. Five thumbs up.

Okay, given up on logical progression for now, will edit it altogether later into some kind of coherrent whole.

intro..?

Just as our bodies are suceptable to the attacks of germs and viruses, and our computers prone to their cyberspace equivalents, so too are our minds and societies open to infection by conceptual diseases.

Vunerabilities.

1) Cause and Effectitus:

We are very suceptable to 'miracle syndrome' because of an ability unique to humans (and to a lesser degree, the higher animals) the ability to link events occurring within close spacial and/or temporal proximity to each other into webs of cause and effect. We see a flash, then hear a bang, and automatically link them into a sequence - if this, then that - tenuously at first, but more and more firmly with each repetition. Trouble is, because this system is largely subconscious (dopamine neurones) and therefore not reflexively 'rational' it is very prone to being conned. The system also has another glitch, it operates on a sliding scale - in which the number of observed repetitions can be substituted by size of payoff, especially if that payoff is unexpected.

ie: if percieved event X occurs followed closely by event Y, but doesn't actually have any particular direct effect (good or bad) on the perciever, then let's say it will take arbitrarily 50 such observences of the sequence for it to become 'learned'. This kind of situation describes 'background' events and leads to stuff like 'red sky at night, shepherd's delight.' Something useful pretty much only to the herders of sheep.

However, if event A occurs, followed closely by event B, but this time acompanied by direct payoff/detriment C, the learning curve, depending on the size of the effect involved, is cut down to fewer and fewer repetitions. Imagine something stupid, like a clown with a pair of cymbals. He clashes them together, and, undetected by you, his assistant zaps you with 1000 volts, right in the butt. How many times do you think it would take you to form an unconscious aversion to clowns armed with cymbals..?

Imagine some kid on his deathbed. He's a few breaths away from being a corpse. As an absolute last resort, his desperate parents bring in some weird guy plastered in mystic symbols and chanting magic runes. On cue, after the final shazzam, theirr kid suddenly wakes up, blinks and looks up at them. Miraculously his fever has broken, and the shadow of death has left his eyes. They weep with relief. Weird tattoo-chanting guy falls to his knees and begins to praise god.

How many repetitions would that linkage take to form..? Fifty..?

Ten..?

Five..?

One..?

The important thing to remember is that there is no connection between weird chanty guy and recovered kid. Oh yes there is, you say. Oh no there isn't, I say. Oh yes there is, you say. STFU I say. I know - Because, I've been watching weird chanty guy for some time now. In the last month he's been called round to twenty different houses, containing twenty different dying kids. In each he's done the same silly dance, sung the same damn song, and waved the same little tamborine-thingy full of dried beans. And in each house, every one of those poor kids hacked out their final little breaths and died.

Lots of kids get ill. Lot's more in the past - that scary past where hygene was poor and antibiotics non-existant. And lots of kids died. But some of them lived, er, obviously. And this is the point. Kids do get better. Every year a tiny fraction of kids (and grown-ups too for that matter) even though they are all but kicking down death's door, suddenly get better. All by themselves. Spontaneous remission. Look it up.

But sometimes the event 'get better' co-incides with the event 'Weird magic chanty guy.' And then, the wires get crossed.



I don't know about you, but right now, even though I'm writing this, and try to live fairly squarely in my forebrain, rather than the bit behind it, I can feel my hind-brain niggling. After all the books I've read, and the huge amounts of history that is chiefly connected by the deaths of millions of people who were not saved by supernatural means, a part of me is still saying quietly to itself "butbubut that weird-chanty guy must have had something to do with it."

Which leads me onto vunerability 2.

2) Addiction to explanation:

If our minds were simply content with drawing connections between events x and events y, then perhaps we wouldn't have so much trouble. Trouble is though, the fact that 99 times out of 100 there is a connection of some sort between event x and event y is in itself an adaptive force that over the epoches has rooted itself so deeply into our genetic predispositions that we no longer need to actually witness event x to intuit its presence simply by witnessing event y.

Have you ever been just about to drift off into sleep when suddenly you hear a noise somewhere in the house..? It wasn't a 'fridge coming on' kinda noise, neither was it a 'ticking pipe' kinda noise, nor a 'rattling tree-branch' kinda noise either. One of those noises. I hate those noises. They make you lie awake for a while, straining with every sense for its repetition, half hoping to hear it again, half not. And all the while your mind is going crazy, trying out a thousand theories, trying to fit that noise into any one of the thousand holes of noises past stored in your memory, and at the same time hormones are leaking through your muscles, pricking up the hairs on your arms and the back of your neck and making you remember you have that length of steel piping hidden under the bed, just in case...

You have to get up. You have to get up and search for the cause. Any cause will do, however half-arsed it may be, just so long as you can get back to sleep without worrying overmuch that you'll never wake up again.

We're addicted to explanations.

I love old vampire movies. I vant to drink your blood. Lizten to the children ov ze night, vat vunderful muzic zey make. Love 'em. When you haven't got streetlights, or streets either for that matter, the night is a scary ole place. Because people sometimes die out there, just beyond the circle of the fire, where the black begins.

One of the irritating things about finding bodies in the morning is that you are left with event y - ie the body - but event x is nowhere in sight. This leaves your hind-brain backtracking through the 'shit that happened yesterday' list until it gets to the last event that ocurred prior to 'finding dead body', which is unfortunately 'it got dark'. There's a huge gap. (But just to be on the safe side, your brain chemistry begins to make you afraid of the dark anyway, however illogical it may be).

You're left with intuited theories like - "When it gets dark, poeple die." or worse, "darkness kills people". Maybe primitive scientist, in light of this budding fear, tests his theory. He gets volunteer 1 to enter darkened hut A to see if the darkness kills him. It doesn't. You'd think this would be a relief, but it isn't. If darkness killed, you could just make sure you always kept the fire burning, a bit of a pain, but no biggie.

So then you're left with "Something in the darkness kills people." Now that's harder to test. Because to test it, you have to go into the darkness. But say primitive scientist has a few brave mates and they all venture off into the dark the next night, albeit with a bunch of flaming torches.

They don't die. Still no relief.

The next night they go out again, but without the torches.

They don't die. Damn.

But hang on, that body was just one body, not a bunch of people. Now the theory becomes "something in the darkness kills people who are own their own..." So, primitive scientist, who, in addition to being brave is also a fucking idiot, goes out the next night into the darkness, all by himself.

They find him in the morning. dead as a doornail.

Back to square one. And everyone now is too scared to do anything but quivver under their blankets as soon as the sun dips down below the horizon. Which is not good, because sometimes you have to go into the dark. Especially if the neighboring group knows that you guys spend every night quaking under the covers and also that you have some really nice stuff, or a really pretty daughter...

When I was younger, sonn after I'd gotten my first job, I suddenly had more money than I knew what to do with, and the freedom to spend it on any old shit I fancied. One of the first things I bought was a good take-down bow, and a bunch of sexy black carbon firbre arrows. I lived in an empty farm house at the time - a renovated old serf's cottage. There was a large field out back, laying fallow. I lugged a couple of hay bales (note - surprisingly heavy for a bunch of dried grass) and set them up, pinning a target to a couple of layers of cardboard and sticking it up to shoot at.

I lost the first arrow I ever shot. Not because I missed, but because the arrow struck the target squarely in the blue ring, and went right through, presumably to bury itself completely in the soil somewhere beyond. I never found it. The arrows btw. were blunt tipped - rounded, and the bow itself was only a 40lb draw target bow, not the heavier 70lb hunting type, and yet, the arrow, from 30m away went through the paper, 3 layers of cardboard, about 2 feet of densely packed straw, and still had enough energy left to bury it's 60cm length in the loose soil.

Interesting fact, if you want to pierce bullet-proof glass, use an arrow.

Imagine you're hungry and tired, hunting at dusk. You hear a noise, and loose an arrow. You hit something. Unfortunately you find some poor bastard leaking from the neck, and no arrow in sight. After fruitlessly scouting around a bit, you decide to scarper back off to your village, and keep stumm. The ground is loamy, and there's a local shower of rain, though it's dried up by the morning, in fact, you'd never have known it had rained at all.

In the morning a body is found, white as a sheet, with two clean holes in its throat, and no blood to be seen anywhere. Scary.

Or imagine that same night. Some guy's drunk as a skunk, weaving his way through the darkness back home. Unfortunately, he runs into the end of a pointy branch, right at throat height. Manages to sever a carotid. Bleeds to death on that same bit of loamy ground, and is washed down by that same shower.

The whole village begins to talk about it. Then dotty old granny remembers a story she heard, ooh way back, happened to a friend of a friend's uncle in the old country. About monsters who sucked the blood of people caught alone in the dark. Holy-moley says everyone - so that's what happened to that first guy, and primitive scientist guy. Oh boy we are so fucked now.

But then granny also remembers that garlic drives them off.

Vampires are bullshit. Along with fairies, werewolves and ghosties and ghoulies of all kinds. But, they are useful bullshit. Because they offer cause. And much more importantly, they offer precautions. Garlic. Wolfsbane, silver, secret signs, chants and ritual movements. The unknown killer in the darkness which cannot be stopped by any means becomes the (falsely) known killer in the darkness, which can. Whip out your garlic necklace and you're safe as houses - wanna go for a walk in the nightime..? Go right ahead.

Nothing has changed. Some people will go out into the dark, and never come back. But the important bit to remember is, the people who know about vampires, will still be able to go out in the dark, whereas the ones who have no explanations at all, not even bullshit ones, won't. And sooner or later, something very mundane, maybe called Fred, armed with a bad attitude, an empty belly and very little food, will come out of the unwatched and unventured-into darkness and kill them for the contents of the pantry.

Any explanation is better than none.

Loss Aversion:

Hunger for power:

3: Loss Aversion:

I know, I know, you're wondering what the hell loss aversion has got to do with something purely conceptual, having no actual material worth. How can you fear the loss of something not there to begin with..?

Aha.

When I was younger. Again. I used to paint. Okay, I wasn't the world's best painter, but equally, I wasn't the worst guy to ever pick up a brush.

One of the most expensive paintings in the world is this one:



The portrait of Dr. Gachet by old one-ear himself. Some half-wit with more money than braincells bought it for 82.5 million dollars.

Now, say one day I was bored, so I painted a picture. For some reason I painted it using the exact same type and amounts of paint that Van Gogh used in painting Dr. Gachet, down to the last milligram. By happenstance, I also use the same colours, in exactly the same overall proportions. The same kind of canvas on the same stretchers. The same kind of brush-strokes. When I'm finished, and the damn paint has dried, I install it in the same frame that currently houses Van Gogh's original pic.

It's not bad. Let's say it ends up a bit like this, but better, obviously.



Tucking the finished painting under my arm, I trot round to Mr. More-Money-Than-Sense's mansion and show him. He says "What's that fucking piece of crap..?" And I ask him why.

The materials.
The materials are the same.
The quality of paint.
It's the same paint.
The brushwork.
It's the same brushwork.
The subject.
Mine's got a guy with a hat and a flower sitting at a table. And look ! Mine's actually got extra stuff in too !!!

So now, poor Mr. Bigbucks is feeling angry. Materially, he's just bought a painting that only cost me about 50 dollars for 82.5 million. So now he starts going on about composition. It's passion. The depth of feeling it invokes in the viewer. The painting's age, it's history and the reputation of Van Gogh himself; the fact that it's one of the most sought after and well known images in the world. He wins of course. In those terms, my painting is a bunch of crap.

But it's important to notice two things. One: those terms are all conceptual terms, you can neither hold them in your hand, nor put them in your pocket. And two: to justify his investment, he was forced to resort to a conceptual defence, otherwise, what was he left with..? A nice picture worth 50 bucks. A real, tangible loss of $82,499,050.oo cents.

How's that for loss aversion..?

Investments don't need to be made in money of course. What's money anyway but crystallized time and effort..? What hurts more in divorce..? Your bwoken widdle heart, or the now worthless years you invested in your marriage, the blood the sweat the tears..? Broken hearts can easily be fixed by 18-year old Swedish exchange students, or alternatively by prozac™. But those years, that energy, they're lost forever.

And so it is with any conceptual property. Once you have it, it aquires value - sometimes simply the warm glow in your heart when you look upon a woman who loves you, and sometimes a real tangible value - especially if your profession is based upon a concept - then that concept is food in your stomach and clothes on your back.

However, that value, being conceptual, is prone to conceptual attack. And if you're a priest then some weirdy beardy guy proclaiming 'god icht dead' might as well be stealing your wallet.

4: Getting fucked out of our heads on dope.

Pretty self explanatory, but often forgotten. Mankind does like it's drugs. Show a man a mushroom, and soon enough he's tripped out of his skull talkin' to the angels. I wasn't exactly a regular on LSD back in my early twenties, but I did take enough to see some weird and wonderful things.

Okay, today, after going to the goddam streetmarket and buying about 50 kilos of food, shouting at the bloody kids and dealing with a malfunctioning water-heater, finally I get to the PC.

Arrgh. I'm on holiday for god's sake.

Anyway.

Conceptual symbionts.

My new and exciting bit of jargon. These little beasties are classified (a) by having no direct physical components, (b) by being a collection of ideas, or closer to the mark by being a sequence of ideas which both lead to and re-inforce eachother, and finally (c) once adopted, become indespensible on a global scale, at least for a period of time.

It must also be noticed that the initial idea in the sequence is one that is already implicit within whatever system it arises from.

I've searched around for a good illustration and come up with football. Not, alas, the American kind, because I don't know enough about it and lack the will to bother aquiring such knowledge, but the British kind. "Soccer". Blasphemy.

Back in the old days football was played very differently. Okay, so there was still the goalie, and 10 other guys dressed in shorts, and a ball, but the way the game was played. Basically, one guy would get the ball and, avoiding countless tackles by the opposing team, dribble it all the way to within shooting range. Then shoot. GOAL !!! Yay, everyone shout hip-hip-hooray.

Passing was very infrequent, done only under extreme duress, and usually backwards to another player who would attempt once again to get into the penalty box all on his lonesome. Basically, though all the players of any given team were nominally on the same side, they didn't really play together. "Team" was spelt with eleven "I"s.

I don't know who 'invented" invented the "passing game", I'm pretty dumb concerning football history - I blame growing up in a town where the home team was so pathetic no-one except the real anoraks ever supported them - but I think it was the continental teams when leagues started opening up internationally.

Basically three-men cells would run up the pitch and through strategic passing, circumvent any tackles coming their way, get within range and either blast one in directly, or again, lure the goalie into coming out early and pass around him.

They began to win every damn game, flattening the British teams completely. Outrage, this was our damn game..! How dare they, those foreign upstarts, who did they think they were..!



Of course, next season, many of the English teams were playing a passing game, at least the successful teams anyway. The one's that didn't, got relegated, and sank out of sight. After a while, the only teams left, were the ones which passed.

And this encapsulates the idea of a conceptual symbiont:

The first idea: "Pass the ball before you absolutely have to."
leads to: "Have someone ready to recieve it running nearby. Don't run up alone."
leads to: "Have that player run in a strict formation, so you will always already know roughly where to pass the ball, whenever pasing becomes necessary."
leads to, "Have two players in formation, in case one avenue of passing becomes obstructed."

Each idea leads from, supporting and extending, the former.

Then of course, the ideas begin to gloabally expand their effects, because they allow for specialisation. Whereas before each player had to be: A good runner, a good dribbler, a good tackler, a good striker - now with a three man group you could have one great striker, and two (or more) great dribblers to support him - laying the ball off to him after they had brought it to within range.

Midfielders to pick up loose balls, and double as striker-support, defenders to put down attacks - multiple, clearly defined roles, allowing for mutually supportive specialists.

All stemming from a simple initial idea of "pass the damn ball genius."

This is what I mean when I say "Conceptual Symbiont."

Anyway, since we've already got the football, we may as well run with it. Just imagine the football has a religious symbol on it.

Team size. In football, a team's limited to 11, plus a few subs. In life however, you can field as many players as you can get onto the pitch. There's more to it than that though - it's no good having more players if no-one knows which side they're playing for, or in which direction they should be kicking the ball.

The monkeysphere. I know I go on about this a lot, but it is absolutely foundational to any social theory. A.B.S.O. F.U.C.K.I.N.G. L.U.T.E.L.Y.

We're so blasé about meeting strangers these days. We see a dozen a day, and talk to/interact with a couple of them in the course of work/socializing whatever. We think nothing of it.

The only real predator of man left on the planet is man. So why aren't we scared of these everyday strangers..? I mean, imagine there was no law, no over-reaching systems of mutual co-operation - everything you owned, you made; everything you ate, you grew or raised; your water, you lugged up from the well yourself, from the river. The house you live in, the clothes you wear - all of them came from your hands. You do not need anything from another. And they, if they exist (you haven't seen them) shouldn't really need you for anything either. So why would they approach you..? Simple curiousity..? Imagine there's a mountain range between you and some guy you've only ever heard rumours about anyway, would simple curiousity be enough to get you to cross them..?

The only reasons for utterly self-sufficient groups, living in adequately-resourced areas isolate from each other, with no previous history of interaction, to visit one another, are bad ones.



Welcome to blob-land. I want you to imagine a bunch of blobs. They have two states: Sedentary and passive, mobile and aggresive. During their lifetimes, these blobs grow slowly, absorbing nutrients from the area where they lay until one of two things happens:

*Their size goes over a certain value, let's say around 250-300 units.
*They exhaust the nutrients of their locale.

In the first instance, the bloated mother blob splits, and calves off a new blob which promptly switches into mobile-aggressive mode and disappears over the horizon. This new blob doesn't stop until it finds somewhere with enough nutrients to support its growth, where it settles into sedentary mode. If there are no such places left unnoccupied it will attack and either displace another blob, or assimilate it utterly, unless driven off.

In the second case, the whole blob, whatever it's current size, switches into mobile aggressive mode and goes off on the hunt for somewhere new to live.

I think this, barring a little inter-group female raiding/exchange, adequately describes the general state of primitive mankind.

[Remember Game-theory 101..? Remember the initial winning strategy at low pop. density..? "Always default". ie, always attack, and always attack first. And remember, "Always default" is also responsible for keeping the pop. density low, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.]

Now, we forgot football. Incorporating the above, I want you to imagine that the players in each team are not individuals, but blobs - groups of people about 150-200 - in size. For example - this is a mid-fielder - Hobbes.



He's quite a big lad, isn't he..?

But how is this Hobbesian game played..? Despite the general 'team'ness, there is no team. A player gets the ball, and is tackled. But the player, and the tackler, are largely on their own. It's one-on-one. In fact, the whole global game, despite there being 22 players on the pitch, is only ever one-on-one. In any tackle event, the other 20 players might as well not exist. No-one on either side will help their player/tackler because the target is 'the ball' and personal glory, not so much the overall outcome of the game - and under these conditions - a far better strategy is to wait until either the ball spins free, or to tackle whoever gets the ball, while they are tired from the recent conflict.

Now let's chuck one of the Hobbesian teams off the pitch, and install a passing-game playing continental. The players of this team have decided to sacrifice the personal glory of scoring an individual goal, to the more global joint-glory of 'winning the game'.

Which team wins..? Not a hard calculation. The continentals are playing eleven men against a team of one.

enough for today I fink.

Recognition/trust-strip. Rules of play. Mutual support. Them/us.

I LOST A POST !!!!

Can someone have a look around for it - I wrote it yesterday afternoon..?

Anyway, get bogged down and going no-where.

Start again.

aim: to do for religion what evolution does for creationism. Take god out of the equation.

intro - conceptual symbionts. (football)

stage 0 - maker/death questions cf. intuitive anthropomorph answers. V. Explanation addiction. V. hallucinogenics (perceptive cued concrete ->confabulated/extrapolated forms=anthropomorphs due to lack of subcon imagination cf. traditional sprites with cthuloid "defy imagination" entities).

stage 1 - interaction - cause + effectitius - ritualizer caste creation. V. Loss aversion (1R) - costs loss aversion (2P) eg - modern cults. (religion of hyperdrive)

stage 2 - group size increase. (blobs) metaphysic punitive system - sin by one = group. recognition+trust short-cuts. degrees of separation/god as meditor/attach point between circles.

stage 3 - globalization. externalities force adoption. table.

The question "who made this" or "what made this" - even if the answer is "I don't know" - or the full answer version, repeating the question in statement form - "I don't know who made all this." or "I don't know what made all this." doesn't matter - because the question already has answered itself in the initial word - the 'who' the 'what' - and the answer, negative or positive - reaffirms the presence of an agent. - the answer "I don't know (who or what) the maker is." does not refute the existance of a maker, simply denies knowledge of the particulars of that agent.

The unbiased question, which no-one reflexively asks, is "Was all this created by someone or something, and if so, what or who..?"

ie: the asking of the question creates the maker, before it is even answered.