God is pissed off at you. Ask for forgiveness. Sacrifice a young calf on an alter of stone and dump ashes on your head.

Let us know if this improves your poker skills.

God cares for neither poker nor football.

The poker gods, on the other hand, are propriated by pushing chips forward, showing bluffs, and receiving the All In placard.

Nor does Tom Sawyer, Hayden Caulfield, or Hercule Poirot.

I tend to be glib and dismissive on the Internet regarding religion and spirituality—it comes naturally for me—but I have also given these topics a lot of thought at times when I've been away from screens and keyboards, because religion and spirituality have always been huge and enduring parts of the human experience for a great number of people.

I like to look at indications: in prehistoric paintings, monuments, grave sites and sculptures, that spirituality and religion have always been with us, and that they've been a big influence on us for the 90,000 years or so that our species has been around.

Other creatures also have behaviors that have endured throughout the history of their species. We call those behaviors instincts, and we assign an evolutionary utility to those instincts, concluding that they're in place to prevent the species from going extinct, and that they've endured because they've worked in that capacity.

So that gets me wondering about religion and spirituality as a human instinct, in terms of asking what their evolutionary utility could be. I'm far from being an expert on evolutionary sociology, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it.

Our current knowledge suggests that humans were organized into small to medium hunter/gatherer tribes for the first 80,000 years of our existence. Religion could have served as a control mechanism for ensuring the survival of the tribes by providing authority structures for leaders, ensuring cooperation within the tribe against competing tribes and apex predators, preventing cannibalism and incest within the tribe, and encouraging sanitary burial and/or cremation rites that prevented diseases and kept dangerous scavengers away from the corpses.

Then, rather late in the game, we figured out farming and animal domestication, and we built animal pens and farms and towns and trade centers and cities and even a space station, and yet we still have religion and spirituality with us, in an almost universal spread. I have questions about that durability that I occasionally like to dwell on. Questions such as...

Do religion and spirituality, apparently so effective at keeping small and medium tribes around for 3500 generations, still have an evolutionary purpose, given our current massive population, divided as it is into very large nation states, or more recently, large and complexly-networked social media groups?

Are we even still on an evolutionary track for survival at the current time, or have we jumped the tracks and become a sort of cancer on the system?

Or has religion and spirituality—particularly the very large, highly structured religion centers—become a control-for-the-sake-of-control cancer that needs to be excised or altered if we wish to thrive under our current social structures?

Or are religion and spirituality still around because they are more than just ancient instincts? Are they actually in place, as many have believed, to differentiate us from the other animals, so that we might someday become one with god, ascendant masters, beings of light and whatnot?

As for some, completely non-comprehensive thoughts on this; religion is a complicated thing. But whether you like it or not or whether you believe or not, it is not going to vanish, at least not within any conceivable time frame. Why? Because peeps are not happy with the thought, that like, we grow up, we live, we get old and frail and we die and make way for those who came after us, and that's all there is to it.
Some peeps can live with that, but many cannot, and regardless whether you believe in it, you have to live with the socioeconomic consequences of religion.
Many terrible things happened in the name of religion, but then again you could certainly and very viably ask in many instances whether it was really the religion or whether it was just hijacked by the mighty to pursue whatever ambitions they have/had.

I think you're on to something, Fire, with the fear of death. That's a functional evolutionary behavior for many creatures. Being stalked or attacked; instinct tells them that they don't want to die, so they fight, flee, and/or deploy whatever natural defenses their species has available to prevent their individual deaths, and to live on to pass their genes to another generation.

Humans, though, with our crinkled craniums, might be the only current species to worry about death in the future: days, weeks, months, years from now. That's an abstraction of the basic animal instinct brought about by our intelligence; however, we can't fight or flee very effectively from the grim specter of future annihilation, other than—you know—delaying it by taking good care of ourselves. But even that behavior succumbs to bad luck, accidents, random violence, and finally the inevitable ravages of time.

So we abstract the original instinct even further: what if maybe we don't die, per se? And one step further; what if when we die, we're not annihilated, but instead we move on to a new life, or a different state of being?

Bringing about that set of circumstances would require the existence of entities exhibiting capabilities beyond the scope of the human animal: gods, ancestors, spirits, totems, etc.

Thousands of generations of tribal shamans, having been provided with these conjectures, of course managed to plate up many palatable offerings for the masses to dine on. The most compelling ideas spread throughout the different tribes and endured through the generations, and voila: religion.

From that base—ameliorating the fear of death—we add to menu all of the other survival behaviors that I mentioned in my last post, and turn the religion bill of fare into an enduring mechanism to ensure both control and survival, and to last throughout the ages.

But I'm still not convinced that religion continues to be a survival mechanism in this modern age, although I'm unsure of the implications of that.

God is a useful mechanism to manipulate the credulous.

I’m a God. One of the Best!

In addition to violating the second law of thermodynamics.

Since science has a ~5000 year winning streak vs fairy tales and magical sky men, I'm going to stick with science.

appreciate the acknowledgment of efficient increase in brain matter within some skulls
a doll finds bottled up purpose when you flip its sandy hair

Loud.

Speaking of music...

Rolling Stone's 481st Greatest Album of All Time: If You're Feeling Sinister by Belle and Sebastian (1996)

Here was another album for me to run past my ear bones for the first time. I had heard vaguely of Belle and Sebastian, probably many years ago, but I'd forgotten the source and the context. Just from their name, I guessed that they were a semi-forgotten 70's soft rock duo, like say Loggins & Messina.

I was wrong. Belle and Sebastian are an arty indie pop band from the 90's, so I probably heard about them from reading Spin Magazine. Spin billed itself as the alternative to Rolling Stone back when paper magazines were a thing, and while they covered some of the mainstream acts, Spin's greater concentration was on the smaller, emerging indie bands.

I read Spin fairly religiously, but I rarely listened to anything from all the boutique bands they reviewed. The magazine had a stable of excellent writers, and I enjoyed their reviews more than I liked the music that they wrote about, which is kind of weird, but grandpa from The Lost Boys would understand.



Back to Belle & Sebastian: I'm not a fan. If You're Feeling Sinister is arch and fey and art-schooly, and there's not much variation between the tracks. The most representative song is probably The Boy Done Wrong Again.



It sounds like Nick Drake by way of Radiohead, but not as cool as that combo should be, although the song has some very nice string and piano work in the second half.

In case you haven't heard of Nick Drake, he's one of those unassailable Cool Kids—like Radiohead—whom I've talked about before. Drake is a manifest darling of the critics. He released one album, Pink Moon, in 1972, and then he died tragically soon afterwards. Drake's lone album should be way up near the top of this Top 500 list, given the critics' responses to it over the years. I'll post the title track here without comment.



Back again to Belle & Sebastian: I can't get behind frontman Stuart Murdoch's singing. It sounds as if he's calibrating his diction to incorporate Nick Drake's sound, along with some Labyrinth-era David Bowie and a touch of the Pet Shop Boys. To me, the singing makes the songs sound more like trifles, regardless of their subject matter. As always, your mileage may vary. I've never developed much of an ear for this type of indie pop.

My favorite track on If You're Feeling Sinister is The Fox In The Snow.



It's a pretty song, with winsome guitar and xylophone arrangements. The lyrics are plaintive and melancholy and ring a little more true on this song than on some of the others.

Rolling Stone Says:

Being a self-pitying shut-in has never sounded better than it does on the Scottish twee icons’ breakthrough. The chamber-folk arrangements are second to none — like a cup of tea brewed for you by a hopeless crush with a really good record collection — but don’t sleep on Stuart Murdoch’s subtly sardonic lyrics on “The Stars of Track and Field” and “Seeing Other People,” which give these wistful-sounding songs a bite that sets them apart from most imitators.

Not sure if they're damning them with faint praise or praising them with faint damns. Makes me wonder if this album made Rolling Stone's list because they were cribbing off of Spin and Pitchfork.

I had never heard of Belle and Sebastian. I like a lot of the weird stuff that comes out of Scotland, but this strikes me as an early 60s folk combo. if I were still a junior in high school, I'd probably have a Belle and Sebastian t-shirt, but I just can't see this as a top album. Cool find though. I really like these record reviews.

I was completely unaware of the existence of this film. Of course, I was completely unaware of 1972, the year of its release, so it can't be all the film's fault.

Great flick. My favorite part was the dog.

Lions do have a 7-2 and league leading against the spread record this year.

I was completely unaware of 1972 also. I escaped high school in 1971. My life was a purple haze until 1975 when I entered college for reasons that remain distorted in my memory.

Thanks Phat Mack! I like the conceit of "crotchety middle-aged man listens to new music; tries to keep a baby mind but struggles with preconceived notions."

It's been fun.

The more I listen to Belle & Sebastian, the more I like it. But yeah; I don't know if it's top 500 material. Maybe top 1000. I like to think that B&S would give me and my review the two-fingered fook you ya daft fanny salute, and I'm fine with that.

They'll be worth watching on Thanksgiving for like the 4th time in my lifetime.

Meanwhile, my Patriots are awful. There are simply not enough healthy good quarterbacks right now for 32 teams, or even 24 teams, for that matter.

I did a lot of acid and mushrooms in the early 90's. I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything. As someone who came very close to a Bachelor of Science in Psych while I was experimenting, I've always been a big proponent of psychedelic psychotherapy.



The first release of this film was right before they put out Dark Side of the Moon and got huge, though they did add some stuff to the film from Dark Side, 2 years later.

After Meddle and Obscured By Clouds, Pink Floyd was kind of a mid-tier boutique psychedelic band, lauded by many critics but still awaiting their breakthrough.

I love the idea of bringing top notch 70's sound equipment to an empty, acoustically well-engineered amphitheater that had been covered in meters of red-hot ashes at noon on a Tuesday in 79 AD, and playing a full set to no one, or maybe to the fallen, on that fateful day.

Religion is culture. At least, that's what it's mostly evolved into. Well, religion has always been a part of culture and cultural identity, but now it's it's main purpose. It's a deviding factor and a uniting factor. For most people around the world, their religion goes hand in hand with their nationality. Imagine being from Saudi Arabia and not being Sunni Muslim. No such thing. That's what the war in Yemen is basically about. The so called Houthi's are Shia and backed by Shia Iran.
So basically, that's why religion still exists and will be around as long as borders exist.

Blending Spirituality and Religion in the same category is a mistake and lacks nuances : if the latter, like mentioned, is highly politicized and quite tribalistic, nationalistic and unwholesome, I might add, the former is more of an individualistic path, agnostic and as wholesome as can be.

I guess their breakthrough was Dark Side of the Moon?

I first heard them on a shortwave broadcast in the late 60s, and immediately awarded them "Garage Band" status, which is, believe it or not, the highest accolade I can give a band. I don't know how they were perceived by the general music-listening public so it's interesting to get other's perspectives.


When I heard Dark Side, I felt they'd achieved a whole different plane of existence.

Religion has certainly jumped from the tribes into the nation-states, and the attempt to treat nation-states as vastly overgrown tribes has gotten us world wars, genocides, pogroms, inquisitions, and world-threatening authoritarian regimes.

I see spiritualism as the baseline instinct. If we sent a generation of test tube babies into space and raised them with no indication of the existence of spiritual or religious matters, I believe that a significant portion of them would express their own spiritual outlook within the first generation. Then I believe that organized religion would develop in subsequent generations as a sort of social control software package on top of the hardware of instinctive spiritualism.

So how to explain agnostics, atheists, and science-oriented people? I think that there are two possibilities, neither of which are mutually exclusive.

1) Admiration for empiricism, the objective wonders of the universe, and the scientific method are suitable replacements for spirituality. The scientific method—if you look at it broadly enough—resembles a religious rite. There are very specific steps that need to be performed in order to reveal heretofore hidden knowledge about the universe, or to confirm or refute another acolyte's doctrine.

Changes in doctrine, even when proved by the rites, typically run into resistance from old school acolytes, though this resistance, fortunately, is almost never violent in the way of religious schisms.



2) It's possible that modern man has developed sufficient intelligence and/or dropped out of the natural order to the point that our instincts are not as compelling to us as other animals' instincts are to them. This would allow us to toss away our inherent spiritual questing with a modicum of effort.

I'm an agnostic, but I've experienced some profound spiritual moments in my lifetime, and then I've sort of moved on, with my doubts largely intact, but I haven't shrugged off those yearnings for spiritual meaning without some effort. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

On the gambling front: I'm in the midst of a poker downswing. It's disheartening to sit down and lose several hundred dollars within the first hour of play, but that's what's been happening. The losses would have been $200 worse if not for the football promo.

In any case, it's not many buyins when looked at it on that scale. I just need to play my way through it.

The slot play has continued to mitigate the losses. I spotted my first fellow hybrid poker and slot grinder on my last session. I believe he's a $2/$5 player, and he checks the Ultimate X machines while he's waiting for a seat. I imagine that he checks the other slots as well.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
(-$803.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 7 hours
+$414.51

Running Poker Total: 601 hours, +$10808.00

Running Slot Total: 311 hours, +$10321.73

Grand Total: 912 hours, +$21129.73

Splash the Pot Sucks

I played a short poker session on Saturday, and I was ahead until I ran KK into 77 AIPF vs a $135 stack and saw the inevitable 7 on the river.

Yesterday I was ready for some football, and I showed up very early to run a slot session in the wee hours. Then I signed up for poker at 9 AM sharp for the 10 AM start, looking forward to some high hand promo action from 11 AM to 1 PM, when the football game and its accompanying excellent promo payouts were due to start.

I sat down at the "first table" at 10 AM sharp, only to find out that the Sunday high hand promo had been scrapped. Soon after that, I learned that the big football promo payouts had been reduced to a one-table $100 splash pot for score changes, when the average table payout per score change under the old regime had been around $650—therefore a huge reduction in hourly EV.

I did not play a single hand. I racked up immediately. The two floor workers, who know me fairly well, were baffled.

"You're leaving already? You just got here."

"Yes. Splash pots suck!"

I said it loud enough for the whole room to hear, hoping that my little protest would at least make its way to upper management. Then I cashed out and walked.

I will be back tomorrow for the $200/hour high hand promo—down from $1000/hour—because I have to eat and pay the rent.

So it looks like I'll have to win by actually playing poker, instead of being a mere live rakeback pro. Some of you may notice that I have a decent hourly at the slots, and wonder why I don't just do that for 8 hours a day. Well, if I tried to do that, my hourly would drop substantially.

The MGM Springfield slot floor can be thoroughly swept within 2 hours or less. After that, the slot grinder needs to wait for a few hours for the regular players to build the machines back to +EV states. Meanwhile, other interlopers like me are always sweeping the floor, sniping the new plays as they become available. I've seen the effects of this full-time conundrum on the Asian Syndicate players: they have a lot of boring downtime on their hands, and none of them seem to be happy at their work.

So, the poker/slot hybrid is likely the best approach at this venue. I'm just going to have to play more hours of poker, and play better, and build up my bankroll to the point where I can afford to make the jump to $2/$5 without a significant risk of going broke.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 4 hours
(-$21.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 5 hours
+$259.64

Running Poker Total: 605 hours, +$10787.00

Running Slot Total: 316 hours, +$10581.37

Grand Total: 921 hours, +$21368.37

Slots almost overtaking the Pokerz.

Shouldn't be long at this rate.

The Big Score illustrated. Grats to this gentleman!