Re: virus: Jesus as a Memetic Engineer

Eva-Lise Carlstrom (eva-lise@eskimo.com)
Fri, 25 Jul 1997 11:56:58 -0700 (PDT)


Eric, I think your post suffers from a lot of confusion between "what
Jesus said (so far as we know)", "what the Bible says", and "what modern
Christianity says". They are by no means the same memetic entity, tho of
course there are close relationships among them.

One example: Jesus did not write the Old Testament, and can hardly be
given the blame or credit for its content.

Another example: Hell, while a powerful argument in modern Christianity,
is not present in the Bible. The most that can be said from Biblical
texts is that "unsaved" souls are _destroyed_; there is no mention
anywhere of their being tormented forever, the modern conception of Hell.

It is certainly worthwhile to look at religions as memetic structures and
attempt to learn from their successes, but we should try to kept straight
who did what when, if we're trying to attribute memetic intent to
individual sources.

Eva