Regular readers know that in his younger years mariner spent some time as a preacher. One sermon he wanted to preach but never did because it would be confusing to the congregation, was a sermon about the common relationship between bats, beavers, bears and humans. Without needing to sustain a congregation’s comprehension, he may try to deliver it in essay format.

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This topic rests upon the definition of survival, behavior and faith. They all are identical, come from the same set of brain cells and are managed in the subconscious mind except when rituals are performed. This phenomenon is identical in bats, beavers, bears and humans – and virtually all creatures in the animal world. If one is a zoologist, the common term is survival; if one is a psychiatrist/sociologist, the common term is behavior; if one is a theologian, the common term is faith.

Some explanation of brain function may be helpful. As a machine, the brain performs the same functions for BBB&H and other warmblooded creatures as well. The mastermind that induced brain function is evolution, a very slow operator that takes many, many lifetimes to change genome reasoning gene by gene to keep pace as environmental reality shifts. If one could watch long enough, they would see the subtle similarity as bats behave as bats, beavers behave as beavers, etc.

In the human brain, evolution took a strange turn and added a frontal lobe to the pre-wired, automatic decision maker housed in the subconscious. The frontal lobe has a brand new function: humans can imagine stuff that doesn’t exist. This puts a strain on the subconscious engine that actually makes human decisions. Humans can easily imagine that a fantasy actually is real and live by it even though it has nothing to do with survival. The bats, beavers and bears are fortunate in this regard.

The term ‘ritual’ is simply a visible, three-dimensional act executed by the subconscious decision maker. It is an act to sustain survival. A bat decides to look for a cave, a beaver decides to build a dam, a bear looks for a den. Humans, with their artificially enhanced reality will look for shelter as well, but with distorted judgment. It is only the destitute and very poor who know that their decision is based solely on survival.

The second perspective, social behavior, is a montage of experiences among family, community and core personality. The core personality is found in the genome and provides the primary actions for survival but how a human behaves in public, under stress, confrontation, and accountability is a montage of ingrained behaviors externally induced to survive.

So the human frontal lobe, along with the fantasy that each human owns the planet and its natural processes, that community bonding isn’t as important as driving the interstates to new fantasies, that money measures surviveability, has led to a third category needed to describe the ethics of surviveability: faith.

Bats, beavers and bears don’t need nor can induce faith beyond a simple behavioral principal that allows them to take advantage of unusual situations. For example, a bear may depend on a human. Humans, however,  can  interpret reality many different ways. Humans often have the imagination to leverage reality beyond the rules of existence provided by evolution.

The subconscious decision maker, for all it’s sophistication, is swayed by the constant barrage of confrontations caused by wishes for glory, adventure and self-serving behavior. Reality has become a circus of convoluted survival values. Which value is a genuine risk to survival?

Enter faith. In addition to subconscious survival decisions, humans have a tool called ideology to help separate the wheat from the chaff. Ideology has many concentrations. For example, there is theological, political, communal, economic and whimsy. The advantage of faith is that it lays an organized value system over reality by which to measure decisions that are genuinely about survival. Unfortunately, the subconscious decision maker doesn’t accept these decisions; ideology is strictly a preoccupation of the frontal lobes. Unless a human convinces themselves that their ideology is the actual reality, humans tend to drift in and out of ideological allegiance depending on its convenience. Hence the need for divine forgiveness for habitual sinners.

Given all these machinations, the subconscious decision maker doesn’t wander far from it’s genome instructions. Survival, care for loved ones and concern for it’s tribe are the core reality. The extent to which the circus realities of the frontal lobe cause nuisance and disruption to our subconscious survival skill places great pressure on the true interpretation of reality. Just ask the bats, beavers and bears how much.

Ancient Mariner