The next level of this may be that those parts of a brain that fire when considering a deity's will are more highly correlated with the parts that fire when thinking one's own desires, than when thinking of the will of others.
Perhaps we're really describing the same mental faculty - conflation with brands, and religions, and political parties, are all just manipulations of the brain's habituated desire circuits, and to the person experiencing the "loyalty" just feel like being "true to oneself."
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.full
Perhaps we're really describing the same mental faculty - conflation with brands, and religions, and political parties, are all just manipulations of the brain's habituated desire circuits, and to the person experiencing the "loyalty" just feel like being "true to oneself."
This may be a tautology.