This essay builds on the concept of "Boxes" introduced in my April Summary.  In a nutshell, we are all trapped in "Box 1", which is the world "inside our heads". For millennia, there has been little dispute over the fact that our access to "reality" is far from trustworthy. In the extreme, there are those who claim that "reality" doesn't exist at all, or at least the existence cannot be proven. I am reminded of a professional geologist I once met. He managed to make a living dating million-year-old rocks, while simultaneously believing that the world was 4,000 years old. As the Red Queen said, we are capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast. "Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why,...

In Alien 1979, we were introduced to a creature that invades its host and connects itself so deeply to the host's internal organs that removal of the invader will kill the victim. When religion is installed in the mind of a baby and left to grow for years, disentanglement seems close to psychological suicide. The human "self" is so entangled with the invader that survival without the resident alien seems impossible. In fact, the invader has become the "self". The alien egg is planted soon after birth. The victim is raised in a deeply religious household that is itself part of a religious culture. Inside the bubble, the fantasy is daily reality. This is particularly insidious for women, who may find themselves mothers in their early teens, saddled with caring for (and infecting) families of their own long before they develop brains that are capable of "pushing back" against bubble-think. Religion tends to be "hard wired" into generations of wo...

[From Yabberz Greatest Hits] Perhaps right at the core of most religious thought is the idea that "things happen for a reason". In the Biblical tradition, this reason is in the Mind of God. His plan has a fundamentally moral aspect (it's good and merciful). Everyone outside of mental hospitals agrees that the "plan" is completely inscrutable. Even when stripped of all the particulars of theology, many people cling to the last vestiges of this idea. They ask "why" a person is "taken away" in the prime of life or "why" innocent, good people are destroyed by random events like hurricanes and earthquakes. The question is always rhetorical. It's rude to attempt an answer. Even those who think there is no reason feel in their bones that there  ought  to be one. I've often encountered people who earnestly believe in "fate", which is (to me) the silly idea that whatever happened was what somehow  had  to happen. This pulls...