Fine-Tuning Argument vs Argument From Miracles

[rousseau]

Describing our propensity for religion as pure indoctrination is just wrong. No, religious organizations don't help the matter, but nobody is stopping religious followers from seriously questioning their beliefs. No one is forcing them to go to church every Sunday. Ok, in some regions there are social dynamics involved, but that's another story.

Point is, our propensity for religion came before, and very likely was the cause of religious power structures.

People like believing that God exists, people like believing that there is some kind of order to all of this, people like believing that the bad stuff that's happened to them is purposeful, and not just arbitrary punishment.

It's easy to get a sense that people don't think like this when you spend all of your time hanging out at Rationalist forums, but the above is the human race, this is us.

At best you can educate people well enough that they're forced to take a skeptical stance on religion, but then the same type of thinking just ends up being applied to other things.

People like to believe in magic and structure and they'll go to great lengths to convince themselves that they're not just a bag of atoms that's going to become soil.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Describing our propensity for religion as pure indoctrination is just wrong.

I'm glad I didn't then.

No, religious organizations don't help the matter, but nobody is stopping religious followers from seriously questioning their beliefs.

Um, yeah, they are.

No one is forcing them to go to church every Sunday.

Wrong again.

Ok, in some regions there are social dynamics involved, but that's another story.

No, that's pretty much the story, starting with the "social dynamics" of the family unit and then layered into the social dynamics of the friends and families of friends and then the community and then the overall society, etc. Don't confuse relatively recent generational distance (and that primarily in just "western" countries) from more forceful days and regions.

If you've ever been through the "bible belt" in the US alone you will literally be submerged in cult iconography, beliefs and dense social pressure to conform to certain core beliefs.

Point is, our propensity for religion came before

Our "propensity for"? And "came before" what, because the only thing I remember coming before cult beliefs in my household was the training wheels of cult beliefs, better known as lies about such magical beings as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, ALL of which are essentially indoctrination tactics into mystical thinking.

Yet my friends who grew up with no such conditioning were all pretty much atheists by the time they hit puberty.

People like believing that God exists, people like believing that there is some kind of order to all of this, people like believing that the bad stuff that's happened to them is purposeful, and not just arbitrary punishment.

Which is part of the reason why it works so well.

It's easy to get a sense that people don't think like this when you spend all of your time hanging out at Rationalist forums, but the above is the human race, this is us.

Yeah, thanks, but that's not what ANY of what I've posted about has come from. It comes from my own upbringing in St Louis--in the christian cult--and then Eugene Oregon and then living the last thirty years in New York and a lifelong study of cult indoctrination of all forms.

People like to believe in magic and structure and they'll go to great lengths to convince themselves that they're not just a bag of atoms that's going to become soil.

If that were true, then why do such cults use such tactics over and over and over....repeat previous.

If ALL it were is people liking to believe in magic, then there would never be a need for proselytizing or the crusades or pamphlets or God-teething characters like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, etc.

 

[rousseau]

I'm not claiming that it's all people liking to believe in magic, which I made clear in my post. But in the name of accuracy I don't think it's helpful to think in the black/white terms of indoctrination. There are two sides to the story, one is religious structures that prey on their members, the other is people who eat it up because they like it.

To date I've studied pretty much every major world religion, including that of the North American and African indigenous, and I can tell you that people thought in spiritual terms long, long before any formal religious structures arose.

 

[Rhea]

No one is forcing them to go to church every Sunday.

I was forced every Sunday until I was twelve.

 

[rousseau]

If religious discussion on this forum is just staged for some imaginary, enraptured audience who is chomping at the bit to change their views, I'm out.

Respond to the content of the post, don't pick at individual lines for a political aim. Or do that, but I have no interest in that kind of conversation. So again, if that's what we're doing, I'm out.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

..

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I'm not claiming that it's all people liking to believe in magic, which I made clear in my post. But in the name of accuracy I don't think it's helpful to think in the black/white terms of indoctrination. There are two sides to the story, one is religious structures that prey on their members, the other is people who eat it up because they like it.

To date I've studied pretty much every major world religion, including that of the North American and African indigenous, and I can tell you that people thought in spiritual terms long, long before any formal religious structures arose.

Correct. And there must be a neurological mechanism underlying and causing the behavior. The claims are just too fabulous and delusional. They are not rational.

I think it is quite rational to attempt to come to terms with confusing sensory data, but the claims must be rational, not delusional. If the explanation is delusional, i.e magic, invisible creatures living in the sky, we are witnessing a confabulation that is religious behavior.

When a brain hears about a person coming to back to life when that same brain absolutely knows that people don't come back, an event it has witnessed repeatedly, it has to invent an explanation. It has no memory of this experience so it has to invent an explanation like the stroke victim, "That isn't my arm" or "your house is too dark which is the reason I [someone who is blind] cannot see." Seneca wrote of such things thousands of years ago. The brain is affected in such a way that it is inventing a fictional account, a miracle, a confabulation because of the anosognosia.

 

[rousseau]

I'm not claiming that it's all people liking to believe in magic, which I made clear in my post. But in the name of accuracy I don't think it's helpful to think in the black/white terms of indoctrination. There are two sides to the story, one is religious structures that prey on their members, the other is people who eat it up because they like it.

To date I've studied pretty much every major world religion, including that of the North American and African indigenous, and I can tell you that people thought in spiritual terms long, long before any formal religious structures arose.

Correct. And there must be a neurological mechanism underlying and causing the behavior. The claims are just too fabulous and delusional. They are not rational.

I think it is quite rational to attempt to come to terms with confusing sensory data, but the claims must be rational, not delusional. If the explanation is delusional, i.e magic, invisible creatures living in the sky, we are witnessing a confabulation that is religious behavior.

When a brain hears about a person coming to back to life when that same brain absolutely knows that people don't come back, an event it has witnessed repeatedly, it has to invent an explanation. It has no memory of this experience so it has to invent an explanation like the stroke victim, "That isn't my arm" or "your house is too dark which is the reason I [someone who is blind] cannot see." Seneca wrote of such things thousands of years ago. The brain is affected in such a way that it is inventing a fictional account, a miracle, a confabulation because of the anosognosia.

In the most general terms this kind of thinking has to be adaptive because human physiology is always adaptive, or at least was adaptive at one point. And I don't mean religious thinking itself, but the thought patterns that give rise to religion.

Probably has something to do with an evolved tendency to assume agency where there is none (better run from the twig snapping kind of thing). Paranoia has more advantages in the world than excess logical skill.

So with that in mind religion is actually just a by-product of how we think. It manages to not cause enough problems that it goes away on it's own, kind of a cultural artefact.

 

[Rhea]

If religious discussion on this forum is just staged for some imaginary, enraptured audience who is chomping at the bit to change their views, I'm out.

Respond to the content of the post, don't pick at individual lines for a political aim. Or do that, but I have no interest in that kind of conversation. So again, if that's what we're doing, I'm out.

Sorry, I was on my phone. Wasn’t a lot of typing to do between bites of my heirloom tomato Caprese salad.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I'm not claiming that it's all people liking to believe in magic, which I made clear in my post. But in the name of accuracy I don't think it's helpful to think in the black/white terms of indoctrination. There are two sides to the story, one is religious structures that prey on their members, the other is people who eat it up because they like it.

To date I've studied pretty much every major world religion, including that of the North American and African indigenous, and I can tell you that people thought in spiritual terms long, long before any formal religious structures arose.

Correct. And there must be a neurological mechanism underlying and causing the behavior. The claims are just too fabulous and delusional. They are not rational.

I think it is quite rational to attempt to come to terms with confusing sensory data, but the claims must be rational, not delusional. If the explanation is delusional, i.e magic, invisible creatures living in the sky, we are witnessing a confabulation that is religious behavior.

When a brain hears about a person coming to back to life when that same brain absolutely knows that people don't come back, an event it has witnessed repeatedly, it has to invent an explanation. It has no memory of this experience so it has to invent an explanation like the stroke victim, "That isn't my arm" or "your house is too dark which is the reason I [someone who is blind] cannot see." Seneca wrote of such things thousands of years ago. The brain is affected in such a way that it is inventing a fictional account, a miracle, a confabulation because of the anosognosia.

In the most general terms this kind of thinking has to be adaptive because human physiology is always adaptive, or at least was adaptive at one point. And I don't mean religious thinking itself, but the thought patterns that give rise to religion.

Probably has something to do with an evolved tendency to assume agency where there is none (better run from the twig snapping kind of thing). Paranoia has more advantages in the world than excess logical skill.

Absolutely.

For those interested, check out this article:

Anosognosia-Scholarpedia

In this thread remez is clearly confabulating. There's absolutely no doubt about it. He is not unlike the stroke patient telling the doctor that the paralyzed arm is not his. It's an adaptation to an actual event, quite rational, though the claim that the arm belongs to someone else is clearly confabulatory.

So when someone tells you there is an invisible entity called a soul living inside themselves and it is going to fly away - somehow automatically, magically - when they die to live with an invisible creature, you are witnessing a confabulation, a brain condition, and not something to argue over. Same goes for stories about people coming back to life or any miraculous event. That person is simply carrying on with a tried and true survival mechanism.

 

[Brian63]

A very good summary of how/why our brains evolved to be stubborn on various beliefs, and the implications of that for skeptics (note that atheism is not the equivalent of skepticism, just a currently appropriate result of skepticism based on the evidence we have in front of us right now):

Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die

 

[bilby]

The assumption of agency is deeply ingrained in human thinking.

The idea that events can occur without intent is very hard to grasp; And the entire history of religion is one of attempting to defend the assumption of agency - from animism, in which rocks fall because they want to, to creationism, in which nothing could possibly exist without being intended by, well, something.

The most annoying platitude in the world is "Everything happens for a reason". It really doesn't. Stuff just happens, because it couldn't not happen. You cannot break the laws of physics. Rocks fall because hovering rocks are not a thing. There's no intent; But the idea of agency is so ingrained that it's hard to even talk about unintended events - If you say "Rocks fall because of gravity", there's a subtextual implication in the word "because" that gravity is a 'reason' - that gravity wants rocks to fall, or that rocks want to obey the law of gravity.

But gravity isn't a 'reason', it's a mere description of what masses do. A very detailed and accurate description; A description that can be used to make accurate predictions. But a description, and not a reason, nonetheless.

But this cognitive error is deeply embedded in our language, and so is hard to escape. The English language itself wants us to believe in agency.

 

[rousseau]

In the most general terms this kind of thinking has to be adaptive because human physiology is always adaptive, or at least was adaptive at one point. And I don't mean religious thinking itself, but the thought patterns that give rise to religion.

Probably has something to do with an evolved tendency to assume agency where there is none (better run from the twig snapping kind of thing). Paranoia has more advantages in the world than excess logical skill.

Absolutely.

For those interested, check out this article:

Anosognosia-Scholarpedia

In this thread remez is clearly confabulating. There's absolutely no doubt about it. He is not unlike the stroke patient telling the doctor that the paralyzed arm is not his. It's an adaptation to an actual event, quite rational, though the claim that the arm belongs to someone else is clearly confabulatory.

So when someone tells you there is an invisible entity called a soul living inside themselves and it is going to fly away - somehow automatically, magically - when they die to live with an invisible creature, you are witnessing a confabulation, a brain condition, and not something to argue over. Same goes for stories about people coming back to life or any miraculous event. That person is simply carrying on with a tried and true survival mechanism.

I always wonder about that propensity to confabulate stories and how it's so easy for people to fool themselves. And I've got to think that lack of strong critical thinking ability is more adaptive than high critical thinking ability.

This is one of my central curiosities, but I can't quite put my finger on where it's coming from. Is it just that paranoia has such high survival value, and lack of critical thinking skill goes hand in hand with that? Is it that critical thinking has a high metabolic cost with diminishing returns after a certain point? Can't put my finger on it.

 

[bilby]

In the most general terms this kind of thinking has to be adaptive because human physiology is always adaptive, or at least was adaptive at one point. And I don't mean religious thinking itself, but the thought patterns that give rise to religion.

Probably has something to do with an evolved tendency to assume agency where there is none (better run from the twig snapping kind of thing). Paranoia has more advantages in the world than excess logical skill.

Absolutely.

For those interested, check out this article:

Anosognosia-Scholarpedia

In this thread remez is clearly confabulating. There's absolutely no doubt about it. He is not unlike the stroke patient telling the doctor that the paralyzed arm is not his. It's an adaptation to an actual event, quite rational, though the claim that the arm belongs to someone else is clearly confabulatory.

So when someone tells you there is an invisible entity called a soul living inside themselves and it is going to fly away - somehow automatically, magically - when they die to live with an invisible creature, you are witnessing a confabulation, a brain condition, and not something to argue over. Same goes for stories about people coming back to life or any miraculous event. That person is simply carrying on with a tried and true survival mechanism.

I always wonder about that propensity to confabulate stories and how it's so easy for people to fool themselves. And I've got to think that lack of strong critical thinking ability is more adaptive than high critical thinking ability.

This is one of my central curiosities, but I can't quite put my finger on where it's coming from. Is it just that paranoia has such high survival value, and lack of critical thinking skill goes hand in hand with that? Is it that critical thinking has a high metabolic cost with diminishing returns after a certain point? Can't put my finger on it.

Why should it be only one or two things?

The desire for single answers to questions about complex phenomena is itself an example of the kind of cognitive shortcut you are wondering about.

I would say that both of your suggestions are likely to be contributors to the effect - and that they are unlikely to be the only two.

Paranoia has obvious survival advantages.

Thinking is clearly expensive - human brains use a LOT of resources.

Conformity is a valuable trait in social species. Related, but not quite the same, is submission to perceived authorities.

There are likely other contributors, beyond these four, to the tendency towards not thinking things through. But I don't feel like looking for them, now that I have some answers that feel right. And I certainly won't go looking for reasons to doubt my comfortably sufficient explanations.

 

[remez]

Maybe remez is just arguing a tautology?
“If we assume a miracle-worker exists, then it is reasonable to assume miracles happen.” This is true, if silly.

That was what I thought about the atrib’s question to begin with. The context as presented was why do Christians proclaim miracles are reasonable.
Post 236

Is it really that hard to articulate a good reason for why you believe the Christ mythology?

Here is the articulation plain and simple.


The theist has reason to believe God exists and miraculously created this universe. Thus if God exists and created the universe, then walking on water would be a cinch for him. Really its that simple. If its reasonable that God exists then it reasonable miracles are possible.

Is that reasonable?

To clarify, I'm not asking if God's existence is reasonable. I'm asking you if you understand that miracles would be reasonable given that God exists? For that was the context of your query.

He agreed.
But…and this is very brief……….
Then he inferred that regarding events as natural rather than supernatural is always better. I basically countered not always and presented the RA in that GIVEN CONTEXT of God’s existence.

Now I thought we could have a reasonable discussion regarding how that one event GIVEN God’s existence was more reasonably supernatural. That’s all. Was I ever wrong?

What happened next was everyone else jumped and started declaring that I had no evidence for God’s existence thus my RA fails. Remez is a fool, doesn’t understand logic, doesn’t know science, and didn’t do the work, blah blah blah. Why….b/c they misunderstood the context and falsely declared I was assuming EoG. Even those I have battled here for years regarding EoG.

I completely understand the reasoning that you can’t present the RA w/o first making a case for EoG. Unless of course EoG was reasonably presented as GIVEN FOR CONTEXT to further the discussion. But here that is considered a suckers play for any theist to engage…..trust me…. I’ve learned. You can’t try to have any conversation about the resurrection here on this board because in doing so you will be charged with assuming that God exists. All conversations pertaining to Christianity must begin with EoG. All other questions regarding Christianity are simply "trick questions" b/c ALL Christians automatically "assume" EoG, and therefore are illogical. So logically why would you ask any questions at all regarding Christianity. How silly.

If you want to understand why a Christian thinks this or that (other than EoG), and invite them to respond to some query then you would reasonably think to grant God’s existence b/c you want to understand their position. Right?
No
It’s a “trick question”, b/c any attempt to share your thoughts is met with you are being illogical b/c you assume EoG. I pointed this out to you in your thread regarding “trick questions” ….remember. I should have learned my lesson there. I have this problem of trusting that the question is sincere.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

In the most general terms this kind of thinking has to be adaptive because human physiology is always adaptive, or at least was adaptive at one point. And I don't mean religious thinking itself, but the thought patterns that give rise to religion.

Probably has something to do with an evolved tendency to assume agency where there is none (better run from the twig snapping kind of thing). Paranoia has more advantages in the world than excess logical skill.

Absolutely.

For those interested, check out this article:

Anosognosia-Scholarpedia

In this thread remez is clearly confabulating. There's absolutely no doubt about it. He is not unlike the stroke patient telling the doctor that the paralyzed arm is not his. It's an adaptation to an actual event, quite rational, though the claim that the arm belongs to someone else is clearly confabulatory.

So when someone tells you there is an invisible entity called a soul living inside themselves and it is going to fly away - somehow automatically, magically - when they die to live with an invisible creature, you are witnessing a confabulation, a brain condition, and not something to argue over. Same goes for stories about people coming back to life or any miraculous event. That person is simply carrying on with a tried and true survival mechanism.

I always wonder about that propensity to confabulate stories and how it's so easy for people to fool themselves. And I've got to think that lack of strong critical thinking ability is more adaptive than high critical thinking ability.

This is one of my central curiosities, but I can't quite put my finger on where it's coming from. Is it just that paranoia has such high survival value, and lack of critical thinking skill goes hand in hand with that? Is it that critical thinking has a high metabolic cost with diminishing returns after a certain point? Can't put my finger on it.

I think you are right. Ignorance is bliss and bliss is easier than non-bliss, at least after a certain point. The environment only selects for survival. Even Hawking is on record saying that intelligence is not necessarily selected for.

Human societies are amalgams, not everyone has to be able to design and build a bridge. Everyone living within a society where there is at least one person with the intelligence to design and build bridges will have an advantage over another group without such a builder. Maybe too much awareness is too expensive. Lots of people can afford to confabulate because their survival needs have been met by others in the group. The question that is always on my mind is how conscious are those folks who confabulate such whoppers. Are they really aware of their own lie? I honestly don't think they are.

In the article there is an interesting observation:

... a physiological manipulation, the injection of cold water into the left ear of the anosognosic patient provokes an instantaneous, although temporary, remission of the denial. This effect, triggered by a vestibular reflex, lasts a few minutes during which a left side nystagmus (left side reflexed ocular movement) is observed. In such cases, the patients astonishingly admit their paralysis but again ‘forget’ it when the effect of the stimulation is over while a psychodynamic reaction should not be influenced by a physiological manipulation. These and other data suggest that anosognosia might be better explained as a specific cognitive deficit directly caused by a brain damage, rather than a normal functional reaction triggered by the emotional strain...

Maybe I should ask some of my tall tale, confabulating, religious friends if I can squirt them with ice water to find out if they know they're lying.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

That was what I thought about the atrib’s question to begin with. The context as presented was why do Christians proclaim miracles are reasonable. Post 236

Is it really that hard to articulate a good reason for why you believe the Christ mythology?

That was NOT atrib's "context" in the slightest. The "context" is, what is YOUR "good reason for why YOU believe the Christ mythology?"

In no way is he asking about "reasonableness." He is asking for you to provide your reason for why you believe, not whether or not your belief is reasonable.
And further, that the reason be good and not merely something idiotic.

It strains all levels of credulity that you can't clearly see that.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

I'm not claiming that it's all people liking to believe in magic, which I made clear in my post.

As did I in mine.

But in the name of accuracy I don't think it's helpful to think in the black/white terms of indoctrination.

Again, I did not. I stated:

It's not all that mysterious. 99% of the people you're talking about were literally programmed to believe this (and other similar nonsense) since birth.

I then also noted how such things as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are, shall we say, "gateway" deities that most parents don't even understand pave the way toward beliefs in higher order magical beings. To whit:

There are two sides to the story, one is religious structures that prey on their members, the other is people who eat it up because they like it.

See? Santa, Easter Bunny, Tooth fairy, "boogy men", etc., are all of the same trope that people have been repeating for millenia, starting way back in the days of sun gods and magical explanations borne out of profound ignorance. But it is most definitely indoctrination and reinforcement that is the prime driver. Not the only driver, but certainly a primary driver.

A child is an empty sponge seeking liquid. It doesn't matter what liquid, it will soak up whatever is presented. For thousands and thousands of years, homo sapiens sapiens children have been born into a world overwhelmingly dominated by mystical thinking water, so that is what they soak up.

Is it appealing to them in some sort of innate or genetic sense? How do you separate out the evolutionary effect of being born submersed in mystical thinking?

On an evolutionary timeline, we as a species have only broken the 90% mystical thinking barrier in this generation (effectively since the beginning of the popularity of the internet, so about 1995 let's say). Prior to that point, every single generation of homo sapiens sapiens has been literally born into a dominant culture of mystical thinking in a myriad of different ways and on a myriad of complicated psychological layers, all of which interact and play off of each other to constantly reinforce the same belief system.

So, has that somehow effected our DNA? I'm not qualified to address any such question, so perhaps you can. I've heard of and read snippets of articles claiming that there is some inheritable element, but, again, I don't see how one can separate out the effect of every single generation being born submerged in a culture where 90-99% of every single person you meet throughout your entire lifetime has been programmed since birth to believe a certain way.

To date I've studied pretty much every major world religion, including that of the North American and African indigenous, and I can tell you that people thought in spiritual terms long, long before any formal religious structures arose.

Then you should be very familiar with what I'm talking about. Take any given ancestral tribal hierarchy and you will find that the "elders" (aka, the leaders) of those tribes would necessarily rely upon mystical thinking in order to even attempt to explain existential issues/questions that would naturally arise among the tribe over time. Why? Because those elders did not have any form of deeper understanding of such complex questions themselves, of course, so all they could do is come up with simplistic, ignorant guesses based entirely upon what they knew. Iow, anthropomorphizing their surroundings and origin stories.

The sun rose because it's on the back of a strong man that carries it. Lightning bolts are spears thrown by a powerful man and thunder is his footsteps.

But grandpa, that man must be VERY powerful!
Oh, most assuredly little one, it is no ordinary man like you and I. It is a super man...

Etc.

At some primary point, the answer to any child's incessant need to understand why something is the way it is, for any parent--let alone a "leader" of a tribe--has to simply be, "Because I said so." The second that ultimate response level is reached is the second that learning has ceased and authoritative mandate has taken its place. And the second that happens is the second that mystical thinking takes hold, because primary authority has to then be outdone by ultimate (or "supreme") authority and that's how gods were born.

But is that some sort of innate "propensity"? Again, I don't see how, but it's possible that due to the fact our species has only existed for a comparative blink of an eye and our ability to communicate such complex issues even less so and the fact that on an evolutionary scale our intellects are somewhere analogous to a two-year old (if that), then it's hard to say, but ignorance is a far more likely explanation as to how mystical thinking has dominated our species during that blink of an eye than any sort of genetic/innate quality imho.

And since ignorance is technically innate (and easily manipulated, either directly or inadvertently; i.e., either through a malicious intent or simply a benign reaction equally born out of ignorance), perhaps that's what you're talking about?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Let's also remember that for all those eons persons who rebelled against mysticism were summarily removed from the group, exiled or outright killed. That's serious selection pressure. A lack of mystical thinking, aka intellect, scares people because it is perceived to threaten authority and the survival of the group.

And the craziest of the crazy mystics have been removed via natural selection, Darwin awardees if one wishes. So we're left with the semi mystics and those who's confabulations exist right alongside rational behavior, a phenomenon born out by observation.

Remember Bush's rather heated response to why he "believed?" He said he 'believed what he believed because that's what he believed.' He neither tried nor was able to articulate any reasonable response to the question. Basically he said it was because it made him feel good.

 

[ideologyhunter]

To chime in with the Bush quote -- and it was Bush 43, right? -- I used to get Thom Hartmann on my radio, and found him to be the perfect antidote to Rush and Glenn. One day he veered into religion and indicated he would explain his belief in God. I expected an original slant with some good strong nubbin of observation -- so at least I could say, okay, you've made your own case for religion, and fine if it works for you. But his explication was nothing more than him saying that if there was no god, life and the universe would be meaningless and intolerable. That was his whole argument!!! Wish Fulfillment 101. (Looking at his published works, which include The Prophet's Way, he seems to be in a mushy 'spiritualist', New Age space. So odd to hear him take on the hard right lunatics and then present a religion that's part Kahlil Gibran, part Rod McKuen, and part Celestial Seasonings at your neighborhood candle store.)