Verily the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: I have no concern with one who shaved her hair, lamented loudly and tore her clothes in grief. (The Islamic Book of Faith)
SCENARIO: THE ONLY FEELING THAT EXISTS (THE GENERIC A/B RELIGION)
They led simple lives; emotions scythed to just above the root. Their clothes are plain earth colours without ornamentation: their beliefs do not permit them to participate in any extravagant celebrations or pastimes. Work is a duty; never a pleasure. In fact, pleasure, if felt, would never be shown.
On religious days, their faces are especially calm and expressionless. They greet one another outside their place of worship with barely perceptible smiles; displaying negligible pleasure regarding each other’s companionship. Hands are shaken in token civility, and then they file inside.
During the religious ceremony, the preacher reads from the Book. The Book says that the only true joy comes from Him. Only through complete devotion to Him can fulfilment come. Earthly pleasures are nothing compared to His joy.
They listen, wrapped in calm concentration, their bodies relaxed; their eyes gazing upward. Concentrating inward, they seek a feeling; one that they know will come if they seek guidance from Him. This feeling will be proof of His goodness. His bliss is the reward of those who attain a state of total devotion to Him.
To display effusive emotion is to desecrate Him. People who behave this way are profane and are therefore shunned by the community. Any visible sign of lust and any expression of want is also suppressed, since such things must be subordinated to service to Him. Sadness is only permissible in certain circumstances, such as a death in the family; since sadness, without clear cause, shows that the sufferer is not being rewarded for devotion to Him, and therefore must be lacking in faith.
This leaves only guilt. If the feeling they seek does not come, it means that their devotion is insufficient because they are weak. However, guilt cannot be shared openly, since it carries the threat of rejection by the community. In this way, the community becomes an emotional vacuum where no feeling ever translates spontaneously into behaviour. They know nothing of emotion from each other because all the associated behaviour is suppressed.
What they know of emotion comes from the Book. But the Book is words. Even if the Book is His words, in the absence of behaviour how are they to attach a word for a feeling to the feeling itself? So how can they possibly recognise His joy, when it comes?
Should a feeling arise in one of them, and they are to think to themselves “this feeling comes from Him,” how can they refute this thought? They have no basis for making a natural connection between the cause of the feeling, the feeling itself, and the behaviour naturally caused by it. The conceptual framework is missing. However, should they believe that the feeling comes from Him, then this is proof that He exists. This thought is irrefutable.
If no feeling comes, or if they doubt that the feeling comes from Him, then this means that their faith is incomplete. Absence of this feeling is the result of an insufficiency of belief. Of course, they could give up in their search for His joy, but this would bring rejection from the community. The community shuns the outside world because people there display a joy that does not come from Him, and this contradicts the belief that His joy is the only feeling that exists. The community’s use of the old-fashioned word “joy” itself is intended to distance them from people outside the community. People in the community therefore have no idea what life outside the community is like. Outside the community is oblivion.
So their path is fixed. Denial of emotion is what gives them their belief. And the search for His joy is their only path; the reward that will surely come from their denial.
This is an extreme version of Scenarios A and B converted into a belief system. However, note that it is not a version of The Generic A/B ideology; this is because it does not promise absence of undesirable emotions, it promises ‘super-positive’ emotions. These are mythologies of emotions that cannot possibly be imagined by mere mortals – not “earthly joy”, but “Heavenly Joy”. It is also not a version of the Generic C/D ideology; because it does not mythologise desirable emotions behaviourally, it mythologises them verbally. Verbal mythologising of emotional states only works in communities that void all natural emotional behaviour – suppression of natural behaviour makes you totally suggestible regarding the identity of an emotion. This is why all such religious groupings necessarily self-segregate – to preserve the behavioural integrity of the logic trap. In certain ways, this is a Scenario contrary to the normal flow of faking positive emotions and suppressing negative ones, in that there is an emphasis on the suppression of positive emotions. The Scenario is a presentation of the belief system of an orthodox religion that is completely stripped of all the specifics of theology. It demonstrates that it can be logical to believe in a fictitious religion. It is the stripped-down causality of a religious belief with the content of that belief removed.
THE INVENTION OF RELIGION
A lover, when the urge comes to him, whispers hyperbolic utterances into the ear of his mistress. A cynical seducer can whisper impersonated utterances into the ear of a woman and hope that she doesn’t notice the cynicism. A scientist eavesdropping on these words should not be asking whether the whispered words are true, but rather “why is the man saying those words?”, and “why do those words have an impact upon the woman?” Curiously, this is the same question that the woman should be asking. However, if she is asking this question then the words surely aren’t working. A woman who has been cynically seduced will always ask the question, until, realising that the words will never work again, she cynically decides to ignore whether they might be cynically spoken or not.
It is almost certain that at least one person has cynically invented a religion – I’m not going to reveal my own suspicions. Of course, many people have cynically pretended to believe in a religion, including some religious leaders.240 Jesus Christ, The Prophet Mohammed, Isaiah, Zoroaster, Siddharta Gautama, etc. were all historical figures who whispered hyperbolic utterances into the ear of mankind. It is probable that they did not do so cynically. What they set out to do was to teach mankind how to live. They whispered hyperbolic utterances to make their ideas exoteric to a society that was almost totally uneducated (indeed, at least three of these people were uneducated themselves, and most were illiterate). A scientist looking at a religion should not ask whether it is true, but rather why religions exist and how the belief works.
I am inventing religions in this book, not because I cynically want people to believe them, but because I want to explain how they work. I know that these religions are not True because I invented them. They are not hyperbolic but hypothetical – I am using thought experiments to demonstrate that truth can be invented. A belief in, to be believed, has to demonstrate that it causes human wellbeing. Human wellbeing is only measurable by observing emotional behaviour. But a belief in almost certainly alters how we project emotional behaviour. Someone who believes in will tend to display emotional behaviour that demonstrates compliance with the belief; and an unintended consequence of this is that the belief manufactures the evidence of its own truth. This is pseudo-empirical. A feedback loop is established which makes the belief an irrefutable thought. There is no theoretical difference between an ideology and a religion, but there is a practical difference: religions explicitly mythologise emotional states; whereas ideologies only do so implicitly. This is why scientists shouldn’t ask whether religions are true, unless they are sure that they have no ideology – which I doubt is humanly possible.
So what is the relevance of theology? Suppose a rich man reads the passage in the Bible that says “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”241 He then gets into his Cadillac and drives to church. Clearly such a man isn’t going to heaven; so what is the point of him being a Christian?
Socrates makes an illuminating distinction regarding belief. He discusses the discarding of beliefs, and points out that this can be done voluntarily or involuntarily.242 In life, we are voluntarily deprived of things that are bad (example: we put out our garbage), but only involuntarily deprived of things that are good (examples: someone we love abandons us, or we have our wallet stolen). With regard to beliefs, we voluntarily discard beliefs that are bad. Generally speaking, bad beliefs are ones that are false. The involuntary discarding of belief, says Socrates, is when we discard beliefs that are good. Normally, this means beliefs that are true, and this only occurs when we are deceived.
Something that Socrates does not consider is that in the case of the involuntary discarding of beliefs, the deceiver can also be the believer. So what is going on with our Cadillac Christian is the involuntary discarding of a Christian belief, by a Christian. He reads the words, and denies them. The Freudian concept of denial is all very well, but you already know that I am no admirer of Freud. My stated assumption is that a human is a robustly logical computing device, and that it is incoherent to talk about irrational acts; so for me to accept denial as a concept, I need to explain the clear example of denial of a religious person who reads their religious book and is blind to what it says. The mechanism of the belief is a logical tautology, and this is an absolute, which is why it trumps the words of a religion.
There are many examples of such involuntary discarding of beliefs in Christianity, and in all other religions too. For example, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.”243 In the George W. Bush White House, one staffer said that Bible study was “not quite unobligatory”. But was the above passage followed on 9/11/01? Of course it wasn’t! The actions that followed that date were the complete opposite of the teachings of the Bible. The President of the United States involuntarily discarded a Christian belief, despite being convinced that his Christianity guided his actions. Can anyone simultaneously believe the beatitudes of Matthew 5:1-11 and support the foreign policy of the United States since Vietnam, or of Britain during the nineteenth century? It is an historical irony that the most consistently belligerent nations of the past five hundred years have been dominated by a religion that preaches pacifism. The debate over whether Islam is a religion of peace or violence is irrelevant because the nature of the belief is different to what its believers think it is. Necessarily, it can be different for two believers of the same religion.
Of course, all religious texts are open to interpretation. But interpretation can only go so far before it becomes egregious. Can we interpret the Bible as being compatible with any lifestyle or political creed? Christians are all too ready to quote Leviticus on the immorality of homosexuality, but when considering the actions of Roman Catholic priests they conveniently ignore that Leviticus says that homosexuals should be put to death. They also conveniently ignore the fact that Leviticus forbids men to cut the hair on the side of their head, and to eat any fish that doesn’t have fins; so Christians should grow ringlets like an Hasidic Jew and eat Kosher. On my reading of the Bible, a true Christian would live their life in a way that is imilar to the way the Amish live – pacifist, spurning modernity, non-interventionist, private, humble, etc. Practically all other Christians are merely “Convenience Christians”: people who read the Bible and go to church and then do whatever the hell they want to do.
Normally, if a book states beliefs that are diametrically opposed to your own beliefs, you would voluntarily discard the book. (You might do that to this one.) But why would you voluntarily discard the book, when you are already involuntarily discarding the words in it? Faith then, is not the ultimate act of belief; it is the ultimate act of denial. The irrefutability of the thought actually transcends the words in which it is expressed. You deny the belief, while still believing that you believe it.
SCENARIO: THE FEELING THAT DOESN’T EXIST (THE GENERIC C/D RELIGION)
They arrive at their place of worship in their best clothes. The women wear brightly coloured dresses, and the men wear expensively tailored suits. They beam wide smiles at each other. Handshakes are vigorous and double-handed. As they swarm inside for the religious ceremony they clap each other on the back and express themselves with effusive displays of communal bonding.
The preacher reads from the Book. The Book says that the Faith will release their souls and give them freedom. Only by following the Faith will they achieve release. Their time on Earth will be made beautiful by the feeling that comes from the Faith.
They listen, wrapped in fierce concentration. Their bodies tense; their eyes strain upward. Concentrating inward, they reach for a feeling; one that they know will come if they stay loyal to the Faith. This feeling will be proof of their commitment; the bliss will be their reward for following the Faith.
The preacher’s voice rises as he speaks into the microphone. His pitch becomes frenetic; his words imploring. The crowd starts to moan, and then to shout. They raise their hands to the ceiling and they cry out together. Some of them are lost in oblivion; their mouths falling open, and their eyes roll upward so that only the whites show. This is what fulfilment on Earth means! This is true freedom! The Faith is the path they must follow. They must stay together with the people that follow the Faith to ensure that their lives remain dedicated to this path. People that do not know the Faith are to be pitied because they will not know freedom. But they are never to be patronised because the Faith is to understand all people and their path to freedom and fulfilment. Of course, people who do not follow the Faith show emotion, some of it positive emotion. But this is not the bliss that comes from the Faith.
To the followers of the Faith, does the belief cause the feeling, or is the feeling the belief? Can the cause of an emotion be a belief, and that emotion not actually involve a feeling? Can an emotion still be an emotion if there never is or was a feeling? If, as I have argued, we cannot distinguish between an emotion and a belief in an emotion, then these questions become theoretically unanswerable. So, we can invent emotions without it mattering that there is no feeling attached, or we can manufacture emotions and assume that the feeling associated with another emotion is in fact the feeling associated with the emotion we have invented. We can create emotions in order to serve a particular human need. Should this emotion be a super-positive emotion that is manufactured by a belief, how can it be denied that the belief generates wellbeing for the humans that believe it? The belief is irrefutable to its believers.
This is a version of Scenarios C and D reconstructed in the form of a hypothetical evangelical religious belief. Unlike the previous hypothetical religion, which wasn’t a version of either of the Generic Ideologies, this one is actually a version of Generic C/D ideology. Happiness might be a real emotion or it might be invented – we can’t be too sure. However, this religion is a C/D ideology deliberately constructed to involve an invented behaviour representing a nonbiological emotion. This is a difficult concept to grasp, and it is worth considering another form of this Scenario found in literature.
Poets have a concept of the “found poem”. Found poetry is an inadvertently written poem stumbled upon by a poet. For example, a technician might write the instructions for how to assemble a bookcase, or a lawyer might write a liability disclaimer on the packaging of some product. A poet will look at the words, and realise that with a small adjustment to the spacing and line breaks, they can reconstruct those same words into a poem.
I have been using a form of thought experiment to explain the relationships between feeling, behaviour, language and belief. I cannot claim to have invented this form of thought experiment because, like a poet stumbling upon found poetry, I stumble upon “found scenarios”. One such found scenario also deals with invented emotion, though its writer did not call it that. Tolstoy’s War and Peace244 describes the conversion of Peter Kirilovich Bésoukhow to freemasonry. Bésoukhow meets a freemason who speaks to him in mystical tones and causes him to doubt his atheism. In the initiation ceremony, he is taken into a room blindfolded and led through a ritual where he is introduced to “important mysteries which have been handed down from the remotest past”. This found scenario is of exactly the same structure as the Generic C/D religion. Found scenarios only exist in literature because novelists are doing the same thing that I am doing with the Scenarios in this book: creating a hypothetical mind and then thinking with that mind.
There is at least one other found scenario in War and Peace245: on the eve of battle Count Nicholas Rostow experiences a “sudden selfoblivion” as the Emperor rides past. His belief makes him overjoyed at the prospect of death. “How happy I would be if only he would bid me ride into the fire.” Rostow suppresses all conventional flow of emotion and channels it entirely into his euphoric yearning to ride into battle. I think this is not invented emotion. If anything it is a version of Scenario A, where he is taking a real emotion and misidentifying it. He assumes that his feeling represents his love of Emperor and country, and this is his own form of irrefutable thought. So overwhelming is this irrefutable thought, that he embraces the ultimate sacrifice and welcomes it. Which brings me to another form of religious irrefutable thought . . .
SCENARIO: THE FEELING OF THE AFTERLIFE (THE GENERIC A/D RELIGION)
They gather at their place of worship. The heavy beards of orthodoxy cover their clenched jaws and conceal their tension. Their beards partially conceal their expressions, but above this their eyes are a fixed stony grey. The women wear the veils of chastity. It doesn’t matter what expression the women permit themselves because they are covered, but each must guard against careless expression lest their feelings show in their voice. They greet one another coolly with formal blessings as they prepare themselves for worship.
The preacher leads them as they read from the Book together. The Book tells of the ecstasy that comes from the Faith. The Faith prepares them to accept the ecstasy that will become complete after death. Only through death will they experience the eternal ecstasy that comes from union with Him.
They only permit themselves to express emotion when they read from the Book. As they read from the Book, their voices gather in a crescendo. Their bodies relax and flex upward like a dancer; their eyelids flicker shut, and their voices cry out in unison. They express emotion together; vocally; vigorously and with complete commitment. The eternal ecstasy comes from union with Him! Why then should they fear death, when death brings eternal ecstasy? The expression of the emotion of fear represents weakness – shown by those whose faith is insufficient.
The false joy of the Unbelievers is apostate: It must be a false emotion because it cannot come from Him to an Unbeliever. The Faithful must self-segregate because they cannot live with people who express emotion that is incompatible with the Faith. Unbelievers must be banned from the lands of the Faithful. But the Unbelievers continue to enter the world of the Faithful. The Unbelievers unknowingly mock them by demonstrating positive emotions that the Faith does not acknowledge. The Unbelievers’ false joy is a blasphemy against Him.
How can the Faithful know that the behaviour they express when they read from the Book is the expression of an invented emotion – an emotional state that is pure belief? They systematically and habitually suppress all normal emotional response, and so their mechanism of response has over time become broken. To the Faithful, positive emotional response is only achievable by following the Faith. That the Faith brings ecstasy is irrefutable because the Faithful express positive emotion only when they read from the Book. But not only are they behaviourally mythologising positive emotions when they read from the Book, they are verbally mythologising super-positive emotions that will follow death. The mythologised emotions that follow death are better than the mythologised emotions that come from reading the Book
Emotions evolved as an instinctive survival prompter to animals. Language has destroyed man’s instinct and therefore his ultimate aim is no longer survival, but the achievement of a higher emotional state. The Unbelievers and the Faithful cannot coexist because the Unbelievers express through their behaviour emotional states that the Faith denies. The Faithful can have no knowledge of it because they suppress the behaviour associated with all emotions except the virtual emotion that comes from reading the Book. To the Faithful, the presence of Unbelievers directly threatens their sole life purpose, which is the achievement of a higher emotional state by way of the Faith. The Faithful cannot achieve higher emotional states the way Unbelievers can because their behavioural response has been crushed by the requirement of the Faith that they only express emotion during worship.
An animal’s fear causes it to flee instinctively and this can be explained in terms of natural selection. However, an animal has no fear of death. Only a human, with its language, has the ability to see its life as a concept in abstract time and space, and therefore can conceive of its life coming to an end. Humans, in evolutionary terms have inherited fear from animals, but language has transformed it. An animal fears the potential cause of its death without being able to conceive of that death; but a human fears death – the consequence of the threat.
People outside the Faith who see their life purpose as attainment of a higher emotional state can only achieve this if they stay alive. For the Faithful, the consequence of death is an eternal superpositive emotional state; so followers of the Faith yearn for death. It is to be welcomed, not feared. The fear of death in the Faithful is erased by the suppression of all behavioural evidence of that state. The collective euphoria that surrounds the reading of the Book is manufactured in parallel through behaviour. For the Faithful, their conception of the emotion of fear has been corrupted and they see death as positive, not negative; they are distorting a negative emotional state (fear of death) into a positive one.
The Faith is the only route to emotional fulfilment to the Faithful. But the Faithful have lost the yearning to survive because their life purpose does not require them to stay alive. Since the Faithful can only achieve ecstasy through the Faith, then the Faith must survive. The yearning to survive has therefore transferred from the Faithful to the Faith itself. It is only the Faith that must survive. The Faithful exist only to preserve it.
The Chosen One of the Faithful knew he was ready. He calmly prepared himself for the union with Him that would bring eternal ecstasy. He was relaxed; not fearful. He walked steadily to the place where the Unbelievers gathered; and as he mingled among them he quietly slipped his hand into his pocket and pressed the contact to the battery terminal.
This Scenario synthetically recreates the belief system that leads to suicide bombing. It is a synthetic representation of the causality of the belief, stripped of all the specifics of theology. It is not a representation of any particular religion, since suicide bombing has been a feature of many religious groups, including Muslims, Hindus and Christians. It contains a blend of several elements – the blanket suppression of all natural emotions, combined with the behavioural mythologising of a virtual emotion and the verbal mythologising of a “super-positive” emotion. It is therefore a hybrid of both the Generic A/B Religion and the Generic C/D Religion.
It is a synthesis of many sources: Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation246 quotes interviews with numerous Hizballah fighters, Islamist fighters in Algeria and returning soldiers from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88 (of which the most useful to me were interviews with Iranian Shia Muslim soldiers). These interviews provide descriptions of what martyrdom means for people for whom this belief system has been a particular feature. Fisk has been an invaluable source to me because (unlike most writers) he isn’t shy about giving a naked quote, even if he doesn’t understand what it means. He is therefore a source of raw data on belief that has not been reinterpreted by the writer and therefore corrupted by the writer’s beliefs. V.S. Naipaul’s two travelogues on the Islamic World247 only deal fleetingly with the idea of martyrdom, but explore in depth the subordination of the self to the belief that is a repeating theme in Islam. Robert Baer’s documentary The Cult of the Suicide Bomber produced for Channel 4 in the UK was also a valuable source. I also found several video interviews relating to martyrdom with guerrillas of Hizballah and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam on YouTube.
THE NATURE OF FUNDAMENTALISM
The thesis of this book is that self-destructive acts are all rationally derived from manipulated emotional behaviour; and because beliefs in all cause their believers to distort emotions that are supposed to drive survival-enhancing actions, then all such beliefs will ultimately be destructive to their believers. This is a good point to examine the late stages of this process.
Suppose you hold a belief that is destructive to your wellbeing. Clearly, if that belief is widely held, then all sorts of things will be going horribly wrong in your society. But because you believe the belief, you cannot attribute any of these disasters to the belief itself. This is the most serious contradiction that you can face because it is central to everything you think and do. When the chaos becomes too blatant to ignore, a tipping point arises where someone suggests that it is not that the belief failed men, but that men failed the belief. This triggers a spiralling pursuit of a purer form of a belief system that has already failed – like a gambler who doubles his bets when he loses.
This tipping point probably occurred in the Muslim World long before 9/11. Increasingly, different Muslim sects are all involved in a fight with one another to prove that they are the purest form of the faith. Sunnis don’t think Shias are proper Muslims, and Wahhabis are Sunnis that don’t think other Sunnis are proper Muslims. And at the top of this pinnacle, Takfiris are Sunnis that don’t even think Wahhabis are pure enough to qualify. There is a credible story that, back in bin Laden’s Sudan days, the Takfiris tried to kill him for not being Islamic enough. A Kashmiri Muslim told me that there were seventy-two sects of Islam, and I wondered how they managed to count them. Then I realised that they need to count them because the other seventy-one sects present them with a serious problem.
Consider the history of terrorist atrocities in Pakistan since just before 9/11. At the beginning of that period, Muslim extremists were blowing up Hindus and Christians (each of which make up less than 2% of Pakistan’s population). Within a few years of 9/11, they had switched to blowing up minority Muslim groups (Shias, Sufis, Ismailis and Ahmadis). After a decade had past, Taliban extremists (who are Sunnis) started blowing up Sunni mosques. We have now reached the point where the theological distinctions between the perpetrator and the victim have become imperceptible to Western journalists (and presumably to analysts at the US State Department). At this point the self-destructiveness is absolute.
We should not think that this problem is restricted to Muslims. The fateful tipping point has recently occurred within the Amish, who have started attacking each other over a theological distinction that perhaps even the Amish don’t understand. Religious groups that suppress all their emotional behaviour are particularly prone to self-destruction because they have switched off Nature’s mechanism for regulating human interactions. They therefore lose the ability to judge moral nuance, and are entirely dependent upon religious teaching for their morality. This is the root of the extraordinarily high levels of corruption in Muslim countries. The Amish have managed to survive peaceably until recently only because they lived so simply. This reduced the possible range of nuanced moral issues that they had to deal with in daily life, but in effect they were delegating all the complex issues to the non-Amish people in the world around them. Although they appear to be self-sufficient, they are in reality highly dependent upon non-Amish to provide all elements of local government and infrastructure.
It would be unfair to pick on religious groups as being the sole form of fundamentalism. The Tea Party in the USA is a form of ideological fundamentalism that stems from exactly the same tipping point. Capitalism, as I have explained, has ceased to benefit the people who believe it: ideological collapse is becoming more evident; global economic dislocation is becoming more frequent; America is lapsing into increasing chaos. But rather than abandoning the ideology, the Tea Party wants to pursue a purer form of it – the ideology has not failed men, but men have failed the ideology. They fall over themselves to demonstrate loyalty to the strictest laissezfaire capitalism, despite this leading to environmental collapse and employee exploitation; they campaign for a fundamentalist interpretation of the US constitution, despite there being twentyseven demonstrable errors and omissions in the original document.
The Tea Party and Muslim fundamentalists are as far apart ideologically as one could imagine, but they have the identical logical contradiction at their core.
SCENARIO: THE EMPIRICS OF SPIRITUALITY
Lying on the street was a dog. The girl could tell it was alive only because its chest moved. There was a living, luminous shine to its sores. The dog made no effort to chase away the flies that swarmed there. The girl looked. Something like revulsion surfaced, but she pushed it down and went on her way. There were things to do; places to see. The image of the dog kept surfacing in her mind like a still of bad pornography. Every time this occurred she drove the image away – a forceful diversion of the imagination.
Later, when she returned, the dog was still there. Was it still alive? She looked. She had to stand motionless to detect life because the movement of its ribs was so tiny. Its sores had changed – there was a developing dullness to them. Their colour was greyer than she remembered. Even the flies had lost interest. Suddenly, the dog’s leg convulsed. Again, the girl had a feeling. Was this feeling revulsion or compassion? Revulsion should make her turn away, but she did not want to turn away. Compassion should make her reach down and save the dog, but this dog was surely beyond saving.
She stood there. Two emotions struggling for dominance, but the dominance they struggled for was not connected to the action that the girl should pursue – turn away or help the dog. She did neither. Instead, the emotions struggled for a dominance of identity. Gradually her perception became less about the dying dog and more about herself. She gazed inwardly at this emotional cocktail. Unidentifiable feelings merged together in the palette of her consciousness. The dog was a blur, but contemplating these emotions made her feel complete. She felt that she was a good person despite the fact that she did nothing. Morality had become a state that did not depend upon an action. It was a state of feeling. Was this the feeling of spirituality? This depth of emotion was something that defined her. It was a moral identity, and all that was required to be sure that she was good was to contemplate a feeling and wallow in the religion that was herself.
Action was irrelevant to goodness. Theology was irrelevant to belief.