Daniel Dennett calls for the naturalistic study of religion. I'm all for it, if by "natural" you mean the natural capacity of human beings to look for the infinite. I propose that -- before you do a naturalistic analysis of religion -- you do that sort of analysis of mathematics. In particular, give an account of how, when you know a number or equation, you can know that someone else at a different place and time cab be aware of the same number/equation/and of its unchanging truth. Once you've given an adequate account of this, you might be ready to ponder religion's quest for a being most perfect and all knowing.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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