An old New Yorker cartoon shows a middle-aged man and his wife sitting at home with the faithful dog curled up at the man's feet. The man remarks to his wife: "I suppose to him I must be like a god." The cartoon is meant to show his pomposity - I guess, because New Yorker cartoons are often obscure - but the fact of the matter is, according to some theories, this might not be far from the truth.
In a miserable humanities class I took years ago, I was introduced to books by E.O. Wilson. Wilson was an entymologist (bug guy) who noticed that social patterns in other species seemed to also occurr in human beings. He was familiar mostly with insects, of course, so this is mostly what he talked about and his examples had to do with them, primarily. One of the social patterns he noted was what looked to him as the urge to engage in religion. This might be overstating the way things are a bit, for example: I couldn't tell you what the religion of ants might be; I'd say it's probably Christianity, since that's the dominant religion in the world and they'd probably follow it also.
The 'religiousity' of animals he theorizes is an evolutionary adaptation that is hard-wired into the brains of all animals. The purpose of this is so that individuals in a particular species will work together for the common good, preserving the shared genes in this group. They would experience this as a positive 'divine' experience, which means that yes, indeed, the dog laying at that man's feet might have feelings of sacred awe in his presence. I know other dogs feel this way about me.
Okay. We're not ants and we're not dogs; We're human beings who stand upright and talk and do math and philosophise about this stuff. Absolutely we must be above this, wouldn't you think? We don't worship society or government or any of that and George Bush is not our God.
Is he?
Well, not exactly, but sort of. Throughout history it's been very common for the leaders to be worshiped as Gods. Pharaohs of ancient Egypt were considered living gods, as were the emperors of China, and Japan, and the rulers of the Mayan and Incan people. There are lots of examples. The Romans at least had the decency to make their emperors Gods after they were dead, but they still made them divine.
Historically there's been the tendency for us deify our rulers. George Bush may not call himself God, or at least not yet, but in the scheme of things according to natural law he works for the creator as set out by the declaration of independence. Our nation is under God, you know, and if our nation is under God then who do you think is directly under the lord answerable to him? That's right. It's George. And the same hard-wiring that E.O. Wilson postulates might make people feel a sort of religious ecstacy when thinking about him.
Wilson is not the only scientist who believes this, either. In the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Brain, the author, Jaynes theorizes that in ancient times consciousness as we know it did not exist. Rather than one unified brain we had one that was split in two and one half served as the 'God' to the other half, speaking to the person in the voice of the divine leader and not inside their head, but outside much like a schizophrenic hearing Godlike voices telling him what to do. Jaynes points out that the delusions of schizophrenics are almost always religious in nature and this is just a hold over from those ancient time.
In other worlds, at one time, all humans were crazy.
Is there evidence for this type of hard-wiring? Unfortunately there is some. One of the symptoms of people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy is a strong tendency to have ecstatic spiritual experiences which are associated with their epileptic episodes. And as Jaynes pointed out, the dysfunctional delusions of schizophrenics almost always have to do with religion.
My view of both of these theories is that they are simply putting the cart before the horse. I think human beings have the means of perception and cognition to understand and experience the divine in their lives, because there is a divine out there to experience. Imagine it like a TV set; It has all the apparatus to find the electromagnetic waves out in the aether and translate them into wonderful programming that we see when we turn it on. It in no way is creating any of this, but is translating and showing it to us.
Which means that George Bush is not God.
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