Religious Fervor: the adult teenage computer game
It has been said that the only difference between a child’s game and an adult’s is the price of their toys. Teenagers play fantasy games on a computer and adults play the fantasy game of religion on the world stage. Shakespeare did after all say that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. So why the current comparison of an adult god and a teenage computer hero? Consider: Why is an adult god a popular concept? Why do teenagers play computer games that are so popular and now are so prevalent and so religiously played? Both have to be the result of the same innate driving forces in the human psyche.
Neither computer hero nor adult god exists in the real world with both being just figments of the imagination. Teenagers can point to a programming author of their fantasy game hero but unfortunately adults must contend with the author of their god being lost in the mists of time. Otherwise the hero/god is the same fantasy figure because neither fantasy figure has a real concrete existence in the physical world. That is that there is no scientific proof of either; there is in both cases only the mental use of belief to make them believable and palpable
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But you protest: my religion teaches me about my “very real” god. So the question becomes what is so very real about your god? Legendary folk tales aside has anybody actually physically seen your god – even if the best your god can do is a burning bush version? Is there somewhere (like the traditional mountain top with its throne) where you can go to really talk to your god? (The imaginary conversations of “taking your thoughts to your god in prayer” that your priest tells you to have don’t count as substantiatable real world events. Nor do visionary meetings as anyone can visualize anything they want.) Likewise attributing real world events that you don’t understand to an adult god does not make that god real or constitute knowledge of a genuine cause/effect relationship. While you emotionally imagine it and want it, what is even one real world concrete thing that makes your god different from the teenager’s computer hero? Emotionally feeling that a fantasy figure, god or computer hero, is real is not the same thing as that fantasy figure having some sort of real world existence, other than in your mind.
Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip wisely said that she can be as intelligent as anyone else about things that cannot be proved. Religious people giving emotional rationalizations for the actual existence of their god is not the same as being able to present factual proof – so the truth is out there that a god of religion is as much a fantasy figure as a computer game hero. The acid test is do you have any scientific real world proof whatever that your god is any more real than a computer game hero?
The adult god is just the adult Santa Claus. In the classic children’s story children are told to behave because Santa records who is naughty and nice to decide who will receive presents at Christmas. The adult Santa Claus god also watches over people to see who in their lifetimes were “good” followers and so deserve to join him in heaven for eternity. A parallel in the ancient Egyptian religion was that rather doing a recording or review (as in St Peter checking his book at the Pearly Gate) the person’s soul was measured against the weight of a feather. The only difference again between the children’s and adult’s version being in the value of their toys. Wise folk wisdom from the King James version of the Bible: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
ANIMAL BRAINERS
The Religious Fervor game was devised by Mother Nature as an evolutionary success adaptation for survival for our troglodyte and Neanderthal (some claim we interbred with them) ancestors but is now a throwback paradigm. The Religious Fervor game is human thinking coming from the middle animal mammalian part of the brain (as opposed to the evolved, elevated and intelligent human frontal cortex conscious brain or the older originating reptilian parts of the brain) and is promoted by the VMAT2 gene. Strong players of the game are on the strong side of this gene’s Bell Curve of strength.
The Religious Fervor game can be compared to the “application program” coat of a particular religion that is worn over the innate spiritual “operating system core” of a living human computer. You can always change the coat but you are born with the genetic push to play the game. Playing the Religious Fervor game is done because it gives the same animal base gratification the teenage computer gamers get. The players of the Religious Fervor game go to play it in church on Sundays with other players and teenagers are now evolved to play the game on-line against each other. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. It is an interesting observation that older “children” (i.e. adults) are now being “gamers” and so giving religions a run for their money (it’s only time before games become convoluted enough for the general public to make a direct comparison.) Life goes on!
Thank you for the lovely story, even if it took quite a long time to finish reading. (English is not my native language) Can I ask where you get your sources from? Thank you!
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