Despite its inspiring finale, the recent American presidential election campaign carried more than its share of bummer baggage. The walking cartoon from Wasilla, for starters, not to mention the reptilian Republican mobs chanting DRILL, BABY, DRILL!

But for me, the snake’s-belt-buckle nadir of the campaign came when a poll revealed that 23 per cent of Texans actually believed that Obama is a terrorist-connected Muslim.

“I’ve been to the same church — the same Christian church  — for almost 20 years” Obama told a crowd in South Carolina, early in the campaign.

Still, nearly one in four Texans take it as gospel that he is Saddam-in-disguise, a closet al-Qaidaphile who salaams to Mecca in between daydreams of 72 nubile virgins waiting just over yonder hill.

Oh, well. No accounting for what people believe, I guess.

Which brings us to the Jesus thing. I understand why people want to believe in God. Or Allah. Or Buddha, Ganesha, Zeus or Zoroaster. What I don’t get is the compulsion to find physical manifestations of one’s faith in, say, a cider bottle, an ice cream container or on Wal-Mart shopping bags.

I’m not making those up. A customer at Tanners Hall Pub in Darlington, England recently claimed to see the Son of God on the foil wrapper of his pint of cider. Another believer in Utah beheld the image of Jesus on the side of a three-gallon container of spumoni ice cream. And in Iowa City, a shopper swore he could see both Jesus and Mary silhouetted on the side of his Wal-Mart shopping bag.

The most unlikely visitation? In Monterey, California the image of Mary is said to have appeared in the leg wound of a biker who flipped his Harley and slid 50 feet along the pavement.

Mysterious ways indeed. Nurse, check those meds.

Ah, well. ‘Tis passing easy to make mock of religious — make that ‘religulous’ — beliefs as Bill Maher has shown in a movie of that name.

But a new study by two University of British Columbia psychologists gives secular support to a notion that the spiritually inclined have always taken as an article of, er, faith. Namely that believing in God (or Allah or The Great Spirit or Your Choice Here) does in fact make the believer a better person — better as in more generous, altruistic and honest.

In one experiment, the psychologists arranged for a group of students to write a test. The students were not monitored by a human overseer, but they were told that ‘the ghost of a dead student’ was known to haunt the room. The ‘cheating rate’ plummeted to near zero.  In another study the experimenters placed a large poster showing the face of a celebrity on a wall in a commercial bank’s coffee room. They found that the pressure of “just being under the gaze of the eyes of that poster” nearly tripled the contributions to the office coffee kitty.

Proving, they concluded, that people who think they’re being watched behave better — even if there’s nobody physically there to do the watching.

Makes sense. When I first went to Spain many years ago the country was still under the rule of dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The Spanish people didn’t have a lot of luxuries — or even necessities — in those days, but one thing you could count on: every government office, bank, bodega and barbershop featured a large, government-issue portrait of the dour Franco gazing down from the wall.

The shepherd tending his flock.

But we don’t have to go all the way to Spain to encounter the portrait police. All the classrooms I sat in from kindergarten to high school functioned under the gaze of a young woman in a white dress with a tiara on her head.  Queen Elizabeth II, of course. I imagine she was up there on the wall to exert a civilizing influence on the student rabble arrayed before her — with limited success, I’d have to say. 

Of course, Liz and Franco didn’t have quite the clout of a genuine god or goddess — they were mere humans, after all. For de facto crowd control, you need actual deities, according to the UBC psychologists. Gods, they point out, are all-seeing and all-powerful. Plus they’ve got a hammer no mere mortal judge can claim — the ability to impose eternal damnation.

Scary.

Not that I’m intimidated, of course. I take my moral guidance from Woody Allen, who said: “I do not believe in an afterlife. Although I am bringing a change of underwear.”

— Arthur Black is a nationally-syndicated humour columnist. Basic Black appears Fridays in the Gazette.