advanced friend construction

There's no shortage of unflattering, childlike comparisons to irritate the religiously devout. I know this from both my present position and also when I was on the receiving end. For example, they're caught up in incredible fairytales, or they're hopelessly dependent on the support of an ultimate parental figure, or they're too scared of social pressure to admit that the emperor has no clothes on.

But for today I'm interested in another: that they never outgrew having an imaginary friend. They're obligated to immediately deny this jab because, of course, their particular god isn't a human invention. But I wonder, only half-jokingly, if there's a second strong reason for them to feel offended by the comparison. It echoes the irritation of a forty-year-old when intense dedication to building intricate scale models is equated with an uncomplicated pastime for kids.

Simply put, they aren't casual, sloppy, or immature with what they're doing. They're grown adults who are seriously committed to performing excellent and substantial work, thank-you-very-much.

They most emphatically aren't in a brief juvenile phase. They apply great effort and subtlety to the task of maintaining their imaginary friend. (I should note once again that I'm narrowly describing the kind of religiosity that I've been around, not every kind there is.) They often thank it in response to good events. They often plead for help from it in response to bad events. They study sacred writings about it. They recite and analyze its characteristics. They develop an impression of its personality. They sing about its wonderfulness and accomplishments ("what a friend we have..."). They compare notes and testimonials with other people who say they're dear friends with it too. They sort out which ideas of theirs are actually messages sent from it. They apologize to it when they violate its rules. They attempt to decode its grand plan via the available scraps of clues.

The amount of toil might prompt outsiders to question why a non-imaginary being's existence is accompanied by such a demanding project. This reaction is sensible but fails to appreciate the great opportunity it presents for massive circular reasoning. Because a typical, straightforward imaginary friend doesn't present a large and many-sided challenge, the follower's endless striving indicates that theirs must not be in that category. Why would there be elaborate time-honored doctrines, requiring a sizable amount of education and debate, if theirs were just imaginary all along?

Furthermore, they may point to an additional huge difference that's much more perceptible to them than to an outsider looking in: theirs isn't solely a nice friend to fulfill their wishes and never disagree with them. Theirs is an autocrat of their thoughts and behavior ("lord"). It's far from qualifying as a friendly companion in some circumstances. It sees and judges everything. It forces them to carry out acts (good or bad) which they'd rather not. It dictates a downgraded view of them even as if dictates ceaseless adoration of itself.

All the while, to nonplussed observers they appear to be inflicting psychological self-harm. Or as if something unseen is invading them and turning their own emotions into weapons against themselves. An outrageous parallel of this startling arrangement is the pitiful Ventriloquist in the twisted "Read My Lips" episode of Batman: The Animated Series. He carries and operates a dummy named "Scarface", which looks and talks like an old-fashioned gangster boss. They treat each other like separate individuals. They don't seem to know each other's thoughts. Scarface habitually orders his tolerant underlings to speak to him, not to the mostly quiet and unmoving ventriloquist—whom he calls "the dummy". He's always in charge. He gets angry when the ventriloquist tries to contribute to conversation.

The utter absurdity is that the ventriloquist is the sole physical vehicle for the second personality Scarface, yet he's not immune from the paranoiac's hostility. His bully's existence would be totally impossible without his constant assistance. He's in confinement in his last scene, after Batman has prevailed and the dummy is demolished. And he's keeping himself busy carving a replacement...

I realize this parallel is dramatic in the extreme, although I'd note that the gap between it and some people's self-despising religious mentality is unfortunately smaller than it should be. Generally their creation isn't as uncaring or domineering as Scarface. But nor is it as tame and passive as an imaginary friend. For them, it blooms from out of the soil of their brain activity into a functioning character who exhibits specific qualities. It gathers up several sentiments in a coherent form. It's built from aspects of the self. It starts as a bare outline pencil sketch, then it's repeatedly redrawn and colored in section by section. It takes on a virtual life of its own. Over time, the person's brain manages to acquire a "feel for" the character. Thereafter, even without voluntary control, it can habitually compute the character's expected opinion. The character is an extra "brain program" that's loaded and ready, and like a memory it springs up whenever something activates it. The more single-minded someone is about the character, the greater number of triggers it will have.

The curious and thoroughly mockable catchphrase "What Would Jesus Do?" is one example of intentionally invoking an embellished character to answer a moral question. People similarly use these abilities when they infer that someone they know well would've enjoyed a joke or a song. This is simple empathy redirected in an abstract direction through the flexibility of human intelligence. These common abilities to simulate human or human-like characters—"Theory Of Mind" (ToM) is a well-known label—are the natural outcome of humans' evolutionary advantage of deeply complex social interaction. Noisy movie audiences confirm every day that characters certainly don't need to be nonfictional to be intuitively comprehended and then cheered or booed.

Sometimes, when people exit a religious tradition like the one I did, they may comment that they went through an emotional stage which resembled losing a friend. After spending years of advanced construction on the "friend" they lost, their level of broken attachment is genuine. For me personally, that happened to not be as problematic. I wasn't as...close with my imaginary friend as many are. So my puzzlement overtook my former respect early in the journey out. "Who are you, anyway? You don't make any sense anymore. I think I don't know you at all. Maybe I never did."