Why George Bush might be God
An old New Yorker cartoon I once saw 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 words, 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.