Re: virus: religion

Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Tue, 14 Apr 1998 22:27:53 -0400


Cory,

There is no doubt that your analysis holds very clearly for Christianity --
what I doubt is that it can be effectively applied to some of the other
world religions. For instance, there are many sects of Buddhism which
simply do not have the "go out and make new Buddhists" meme shell. They
depend on people coming to them. To my mind, that makes it hard to
classify such a religion as a meme-complex -- although, as I once showed,
you can still look at Buddhism (in general) through memetic eyeglasses and
see what it yeilds.

As to some of the more specific things (e.g. love of a God, or certainity
of life after death) those are clearly only artifacts of certain religions,
and if you want your theory to stand up, you'll have to remove the
*content* specific elements. Fully half of the religions in the world
simply don't think of the gods as at all important -- although most of them
do admit their existence.

ERiC

Until you are able to serve men, how can you serve spiritual beings?
Until you know about life, how can you know about death?
-- Confucious, 11:11 of The Analects