Date: Wed, 06 Aug 1997 16:44:11 -0400
From: Bill Benzon <bbenzon@meta4inc.com>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: re. explanatory coherence
Aaron Lynch wrote:
> Aaron Lynch responding to Alex Brown:
>
> Alex, consider reading THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY: A SOCIOLOGIST
> RECONSIDERS
> HISTORY, by Rodney Stark (Princeton University Press, 1996). There you
> will
> find considerable evidence of how the Roman Empire became
> predominantly
> monotheistic because of a monotheism that OUT-POPULATED polytheism. It
> did
> so by growing at 40% per decade, compounded over several hundred
> years. The
> extra babies and extra proselytizing of the Christians accounts for
> this
> growth.
It is one thing to account for the spread of monotheism in a loose
collection of polytheistic societies. But where did monotheism come
from in the first place? The conceptual explanation Alex Brown proposes
seems to me the sort of thing we need for that one.
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