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How far is believing in a half man/half horse from believing that bears turn into whales? How far is believing in a half man/half goat from believing that apes turned into men? Not very far and both are just as likely.

There is another, more gripping mythological construct with which the Greeks amused themselves, which I will describe. And this construct is not merely analogous to certain darwinian stories, it is exactly equivalent to them. This fairytale also finds its way - despite considerable resistance - into other disciplines that have been infested with a measure of rubber science; but among the darwinians, this fairytale is put forth, expounded, developed, and encouraged, with little or no resistance, forethought, or afterthought.

I mean the Puppet story. You know, story that goes like this: you are just a puppet of something else. You don't determine what you do; something else does. You think you do, but something else is doing the thinking for you. In the greek myths, the gods would, now and then, help mankind out, usually to further their own purposes. Men at times are portrayed as puppets of the gods, but the truth is, that even the gods were mere puppets of the Muses, or of Fate, or whatever.

So it is with all puppetry theories. In many parts of asia today, the puppet story of man is the common man's anthropology. It is the view of the man in the street. The noodle-seller, the cab driver, the lady at the hair salon, the loan-shark, the prostitute. Ask them and they'll tell you that they are a puppet of some nebulous power: be it fate, luck, karma. Now, why would people be so eager to believe such a thing, especially when it is contradicted by all the daily experiences of all the men and women that ever lived on earth? More to the point, why do so-called educated and enlightened people not only believe it, but promote it, and insist that you believe it too? And here I mean people who are not asian pagans, witchdoctors, or animists, but happen to be university professors, darwinians, sociobiologists, psychologists, and even physicists.

The only thing that changes from one puppet theory to the next, are the hobgoblins that are supposed to be controlling your thoughts, making you do what you do, and feel what you feel. In the rubber sciences, a shift from one hobgoblin to another is called progress. There was great progress when scientific socialism discovered the real hobgoblin that made people believe in older hobgoblins like astrology. And that was: all your thoughts and all your actions are determined by your economic class, and maybe a few other social factors. And then the Freudian hobgoblin: whatever you think, do, feel, or say, and whatever attitudes you have, are caused by unfortunate experiments with feces deep in your childhood past. German-style monism produced the hobgoblin beyond all others. Yes, there are hobgoblins that seem to determine everything about you, but the hobgoblins themselves are determined by the Uber-hobgoblin, called the "ALL", the sum total of all the physical laws, known and unknown, in the universe.

But of course no other rubber science ever produced as fertile a puppetry theory as darwinism. For in darwinism, all the other hobgoblins were dethroned - it was truly a spectacular revolution, and truly great progress in rubber science. For now we learn why it is that you think you like beer. No doubt you think you do, but that is an illusion which helped the evolutionary fitness of your ape-man ancestors. You see, a long, long time ago, when your grand-parents were knuckle-dragging apes, some of them had a sense for alcohol. Now, being rich in calories, alcohol is a most valuable commodity in times of starvation. So when there was no food about, no barley or hops, your primitive ancestors roamed the plains looking for deposits of fine German pilsner. The ones that had a better sense for it survived to leave more offspring. And presto, that is the real reason why you "like" beer. [Btw I'm not joking about this story].

Haeckel's ideas about man amount to one big puppet theory. He was, after all, not only a darwinian, but a monist and some kind of proto-nazi too. So he had many powerful fate-determining hobgoblins to deal with. But that was a long time ago. The most forceful puppet theorist today is of course Richard Dawkins, and Dawkins assures us that he's found the puppet master: the selfish gene, the "total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances". Later he amended his puppet theory by introducing another hobgoblin, an invisble one called the "meme".

And so darwinism has pointed out the hobgoblins that make us do whatever we do. We have mathematical abilities? It's because natural selection preferred those who could better throw pebbles at birds. Intelligence? Consciousness? War? Peace? Selfishness? Altruism? It doesn't matter what, there's a darwinian hobgoblin that makes it happen.

What is the result of all this progress in puppetry? Just as the vile habit of constantly enclosing words like truth, proof and knowledge in quotation marks serves to sap human communication from cognitive acheivment, puppetry theories serve to sap human actions from causal achievment, nothing more.

"For in darwinism, all the other hobgoblins were dethroned.."

It is truly reprehensible, direspectful and all too literal of you (maybe even sexist) to have left out any mention of the Philosophical Mother of the cerebral cortex "revolution", none other than the ancient and sacred Mother Enlightenment!...(peace be upon her Asian roots that were later colored with the French/European style.)

The Virgin Enlightenment's sacred doctrine: The universe is fundamentally rational, that is, it can be understood through the use of reason alone;
Truth can be arrived at through empirical observation, the use of reason, and systematic doubt;
Human experience is the foundation of human understanding of truth; authority is not to be preferred over experience;
All human life, both social and individual, can be understood in the same way the natural world can be understood; once understood, human life, both social and individual, can be manipulated or engineered in the same way the natural world can be manipulated or engineered;
Human history is largely a history of progress;
Human beings can be improved through education and the development of their rational facilities;
Religious doctrines have no place in the understanding of the physical and human worlds.

Let no man question her...let all true believers bow down at her feet and worship.