ABSTRACT
Religion is a set of behavioral responses including representations of reality in reaction to that which is experienced as most compelling and salient. The eternal temptation to confuse our representations for reality itself must always be resisted. Objects of art provide imaginative experience for both producers and audiences. The narratives that make up the great storytelling traditions are examples of imaginative representation that is so intensively connected to the real that it cannot be profitably distinguished from it. The hegemony of verbal representation, especially the written word, lends weight and substance to those concepts of internal motivation and mental representation so necessary to any skillful narrative—but perhaps less significant in the empirical investigation of human phenomena. Human beings attribute agency to and apperceive intentionality in non-human agents, inanimate objects, and those imaginary beings that are representations of the agency of the environment. It is the behavior in response to such attribution that matters rather than its putative scientific accuracy.
