Just as the identities we create for other people and things help us model their behavior, the identities we create for ourselves help us model our own behavior. We have a great deal of control over our own behavior, so our predictive models, in some respects, are also self-fulfilling prophecies. If you think that you [...]

Rarely do people hold feelings of neutrality about any ideology. Few people manage to ignore the higher level structure and consider the component ideas. This means that you can usually consider someone who despises a philosophy as a whole to be just as brainwashed as someone who embraces it completely. A person may know all [...]

Parasitic ideas need to be helpful, or at least not too harmful, to the idea-organism in which they reside, but they can be very harmful to individual human beings. So long as they help (or do not badly harm) the idea-organism’s chances for survival and reproduction, they can cause all sorts of pain and death [...]

People rarely get angry when someone disagrees with a simple symbiotic idea. There is usually no emotional reaction, simply logical discourse. A person might be puzzled that another is resisting a logically beneficial idea, but will not get angry about it. If there is emotional reaction, this indicates that the idea has probably become bundled [...]

Not being seen allows a god to have much greater powers without the human analog constantly being bothered to perform miracles. The Priests still get bothered some, but they can simply promise to “put in a good word.” They can also much more plausibly ask for money than can someone claiming to be omnipotent. – [...]

Collective idea-organisms turn men into tools to be used for the survival and growth of the Collective. This explains why people, who would not normally hurt a fly in their own homes, can be made to travel half way around the world, to risk death, and to kill people they have never met, in defense [...]

It is important to these idea-organisms to maintain the status quo where the powers of individual humans are concerned. The environment in which they evolved included many human limitations. And it is not clear that they can continue to survive in a world in which individual human beings gain more power – a world in [...]

Our book explains how these Higher Powers operate and why their goals are rarely aligned with your best interests. Please note that God is only one of many “Higher Powers” that affect people’s lives. We choose to pick on God in the title, because God makes claim to being the highest of all Higher Powers. [...]

God espouses the highest ideals to which we can aspire. The gospels teach peace, love, and understanding. Yet, differences in how a spiritual being who embodies these divine qualities is worshiped are regularly used as excuses for war, hatred, and prejudice. Governments promise us peace and prosperity, yet send us off to die in foreign [...]

All I ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment. You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there don’t affect you. If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood [...]