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 othe