From: Ben Dawson (dawson.derbys@clara.net)
Date: Mon 16 Jan 2006 - 15:21:01 GMT
On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:25:34 +0000, you wrote:
>The point is that where people have no clearly-grounded
>non-spiritual hypotheses about why things are the way they are,
>or should be the way they might not be, God fills a many-faceted
>niche in their mental make-up. That is a full-on
>evolutionary-memetic raison d'etre. Evidentiary arguments as to
>the truth of any assertions about God are unfortunately outwith
>the boundary of things we can discuss, as there is naught but
>testimony.
>
>And anyway isn't the set of things that could be God subsumed by
>the set of things that are simply aliens? I don't seek to demean
>a literal God (as opposed to the more C of E view [iyswim] of a
>personal god) but as we look to and begin to understand the
>stars and all that, surely religion founded millenia ago need a
>polish? And although we can tie Judaism to Islam to Christianity
>on a family tree, would you assert that the many other religions
>are simply wrong?
>
>Through my screaming (ex-Catholic) atheism let me acknowledge
>that church-goers _are_ generally happier than matched controls
>and do linger longer (that started as a typo but I liked it --
>hooray for systemic errors). But how many have died for
>unsubstantiated belief? I think the jury is still out on whether
>it is a good thing.
This is a point that has been on my mind since I watched Dawkins's
program last week. Is religion really as bad a meme as Dawkins makes
out? I really can't decide.
On one hand, when presented with mad Muslims calling all Western women
whores, it's easy to agree with him. Clearly that is bang out of
order! On the other hand though, that is an extreme example. My
parents and sister (all religious) are the nicest people you could
meet, and would view their own religion as an entirely peaceful thing.
But if faith causes people to fly planes into buildings, killing
thousands, then surely our tolerance of this meme should only stretch
so far?
I think the problem is in the nature of the meme, rather than the meme
itself. If I have a disagreement with a friend over the height of a
building, say, we can resolve that quite easily by looking it up in a
book or asking an authoritative source or even measuring the thing
ourselves.
But the meme of faith arises from not being able to empirically prove
something one way or another. Thus, with no possible way to argue the
issue out logically, humans turn to their last resort - the primeval
instinct of fighting one other - because they are both equally certain
they are right (take the Jew vs Muslim thing that Dawkins showed).
Ben
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon 16 Jan 2006 - 15:42:11 GMT