We're scared of spiders, snakes and apostasy.

Er, research please. Everything I've seen shows that even monkeys have to learn to fear snakes and spiders - it has to be triggered by observing other monkeys being afraid of them first.

I nevertheless assert that the universal human aversion to changing our fundamental signalling beliefs is more than just

Occam's razor says you're more likely to be wrong than I am: a general purpose mechanism for conditioning verbal behavior is more than sufficient to produce the results we observe, especially if you consider internal verbal thinking a form of verbal behavior -- which it pretty plainly is.

For example, this provides a simpler mechanism for "belief in belief", than your proposal of a distinct mechanism. It allows us to "believe" - i.e. consistently say we believe (even to ourselves on the inside), when in fact we don't.

[edited to delete unfair rhetoric of my own]

Mommy Issues filtered through PCT.

FWIW I said nothing about PCT, nor did I say that a parent had to be the one delivering the shame. If your own personal bias about me is such that you can't avoid engaging in this type of rhetorics, perhaps you should consider giving yourself some cooling off time before you reply.