Some people’s God Value is themselves—or, rather, their own pleasure
and empowerment. This is narcissism: the religion of self-aggrandizement.^21
These people place their faith in their own superiority and deservedness.
Other people’s God Value is another person. This is often called
“codependence.”^22 These people derive all hope from their connection with
another individual and sacrifice themselves and their own interests for that
individual. They then base all their behavior, decisions, and beliefs on what
they think will please that other person—their own little personal God. This
typically leads to really fucked-up relationships with—you guessed it—
narcissists. After all, the narcissist’s God Value is himself, and the
codependent’s God Value is fixing and saving the narcissist. So, it kind of
works out in a really sick and fucked-up way. (But not really.)
All religions must start with a faith-based God Value. Doesn’t matter what
it is. Worshipping cats, believing in lower taxes, never letting your kids leave
the house—whatever it is, it is a faith-based value that this one thing will
produce the best future reality, and therefore gives the most hope. We then
organize our lives, and all other values, around that value. We look for
activities that enact that faith, ideas that support it, and most important,
communities that share it.
It’s around now that some of the more scientifically minded readers start
raising their hands and pointing out that there are these things called facts and
there is ample evidence to demonstrate that facts exist, and we don’t need to
have faith to know that some things are real.
Fair enough. But here’s the thing about evidence: it changes nothing.
Evidence belongs to the Thinking Brain, whereas values are decided by the
Feeling Brain. You cannot verify values. They are, by definition, subjective
and arbitrary. Therefore, you can argue about facts until you’re blue in the
face, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter—people interpret the significance of
their experiences through their values.^23
If a meteorite hit a town and killed half the people, the über-traditional
religious person would look at the event and say that it happened because the
town was full of sinners. The atheist would look at it and say that it was proof
there is no God (another faith-based belief, by the way), as how could a
benevolent, all-powerful being let such an awful thing happen? A hedonist
would look at it and decide that it was even more reason to party, since we
could all die at any moment. And a capitalist would look at it and start
thinking about how to invest in meteorite-defense technologies.
Evidence serves the interests of the God Value, not the other way around.
The only loophole to this arrangement is when evidence itself becomes your