Oldie but Goodie: My Captive, My Captive

It’s a slow weekend, my servants, so I’m recycling an Oldie but Goodie: My Captive, My Captive (first posted Jan. 8, 2011).  Enjoy.

Can I brag for a moment?

Of course I can.  And I will.  Let me share with you an example of my great success in making captives to my kingdom of lies.  I spread lies throughout the earth and rely on smart people to swallow them and propagate them.  Recently one of my swallowers peered out of his mindcell and propagated my lies almost perfectly to anyone willing to read his regurgitation.

The article forwarded to me by friends on earth comes from the UK’s Guardian, in an essay by Jesse Bering entitled, “We are programmed to believe in a god.”

The title alone sent chills of satisfaction up my spine.  “Programmed?” I thought.  Doesn’t a program require a programmer?  Of course it does, if language means anything.  But to think that my servants can be blinded to such simple linguistic necessities and readers can believe lies in spite of clearly contradictory evidence makes me a proud daddy.

But I digress.

My servant Bering is a smart psychologist smugly answering the question Is God a human instinct?  His conclusion, which flows predictably and inexorably from a lie-constrained mind like a senseless river constrained by banks permitting no other path: “It is instinctive for us to seek a grand, moralistic mind that is not there. God is the default stance.”

I love it.  But more importantly to my kingdom goals is Bering’s lackadaisical attitude toward the question of God at all.  He uses big boy words to mask his lie-induced captivity as enlightened discourse in the quote below, but let’s consider it together:

Not only do I find the latter ontological question rather dull, but I also start with the assumption – because there is simply no good scientific reason to assume otherwise – that these things do not exist. In my view, atheism is an essential starting point for the psychological scientist, because it enables us to examine the more intriguing and, more importantly, empirical question of why the human mind is so easily seduced by a ubiquitous set of unnecessarily complex claims.

Translation:  I find the question of God’s existence dull because I see no good evidence to assume God does exist.  Because I’m so smart to to see this, I am an atheist captivated (!) by the question of why so many dumb people are fooled (!) into believing in a God, who I can’t believe in.

Swallowed. Propagated.

Ha ha ha ha ha. 

Bering believes my lies!  No good reason to assume otherwise. 

I’ll even wager Bering is so blind I can risk losing him to truth with this question:  Why is there something instead of nothing?

Ha ha ha ha ha.  (My guess: Bering doesn’t even get the import of my question. Lies blinding minds to truth is my specialty).

Better question:  Why is Bering’s question even a question?  Is his next brilliant essay going to address the question “Are unicorns a human instinct?”  or “Is Santa Clause a human instinct?” If not, why not?

Ha ha ha ha ha.

My prisons are chock full of dull men staring out through bars, each one imagining they are on the outside looking insightfully in at pitifully less-enlightened dullards inside.

Ha ha ha ha ha.