cushioncrawler
07-19-2012, 11:26 PM
Religious Belief: A Mind Virus That Preys on Fear
July 18, 2012 at 9:42 am Al Stefanelli
“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational Inquiry” - Richard Dawkins
Memetics is an outgrowth of evolutionary psychology that was introduced as a mental content theory by Dr. Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene.” It is directly connected to Darwinian evolution and, in a nutshell, it has to do with how information, called “units,” are replicated and transferred within a given culture. There is a debate among scientists regarding how the replication of these units of information control human behavior and culture and when Dawkins coined the term, he did so in a speculative spirit. However, memes and their connection to human carriers with respect to the phenomenon of religious belief is also supported by other prominent scientists, as well as the renowned philosopher, Daniel Dennett.
A Virus Of The Mind…
In 1991, Richard Dawkins wrote an essay titled “Viruses of the Mind” which used memetics to explain the various characteristics of organised religions. Susan Blackmore, a physiologist who also studies memetics, agrees with Dawkins and Dennett with the definition of a meme being whatever is transferred from one person to another. Memes are replicators with variations within, they compete in our memories for space and for the opportunity to be recopied, but they are not carbon copies. As is with Darwinian evolution, not all of the variants are able to survive because nobody learns exactly the same way as the next person, so they are actually imitations, not copies. The ideas might be the same or similar, but the expression will change and there will be variants of different memes added. This is akin to mutation in Darwinian evolution.
However, mutations in the evolution of certain memes are very high, and are possible even in first generation imitations. In his book, “A Devil’s Chaplain,” Dawkins identifies and explains the differences between the informative memetic process and the controversial memetic process. The cultural process is based on an idea, action or expression with high variances and the informative is more of a self-correcting memetic process, which is highly resistant to evolutionary mutation.
Scott Bidstrup uses a “joke” as an excellent analogy of a meme. Someone tells a joke, which performs the “infection” stage. The joke is retold, which performs the “reproduction” stage. The joke takes on variations, which performs the “mutation” stage. Some viruses are relatively harmless, while others, as we know, can be deadly. A virus may be the means to its own end because eventually it dies out, but what is left in its wake is disastrous. Religions are not living beings, but they are entities, i.e., their self-replicating nature. These entities have the same properties that a virus has via the attribute to use modes that improve its chances for survival, and one of them relies on the direct link between a person’s beliefs and their behavior. This allows these entities the ability to control the behavior of entire societies. These entities, being ideas that have taken on many of the properties of a living organism, are complex and adaptive. They infect the mind’s ability to comprehend the difference between perceived and actual behavior.
The mind virus of religious belief preys on fear, warps instinctive attributes and skews morality. It contradicts responsible behavior, reason and compassion. It retards free will and causes a lack of ability to differentiate between rational and irrational choices. It allows the religionist to exist in a perfectly rational way in many other aspects of their existence in society while the infected area of the mind is stuck in a cyclical delusion.
A virus will attack the most vulnerable area of its host. In society, that area lies within our youth – particularly very young children. This is why there exist so many youth-driven activities within the church. These activities appeal to the societal desires of children to learn through enjoyable experiences. Sunday school lessons for very young children are modeled after kindergarten and primary school. For the older children there are sports camps and field trips. The entirety of the Contemporary Christian Music genre is designed to mirror modern and post-modern secular music. This is adaptation.
When children are not fully educated, they are unable to comprehend the reason and logic behind what they are told. Through evolution, human children are predisposed to adhere to the authority of an adult. This is why the structure of the ‘one teacher – multiple student’ education system continues to succeed in spite of the higher level of retention of a ‘one-on-one’ educational environment.
Suffer The Children…
All of this makes children very easy to infect. This is propagation and vector. The sheer number of children in our public schools is why there exists a vigorous movement amongst the fundamentalists to return prayer and biblical teaching to that venue, as well as illogical and disproved ideologies such as creationism and Intelligent Design. The longer the infection is allowed to infest the host, the more difficult it is to eradicate.
Dr. Richard Dawkins states:
“A human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. Most obviously, she learns the essentials of their language in a matter of months. A large dictionary of words to speak, an encyclopedia of information to speak about, complicated syntactic and semantic rules to order the speaking, are all transferred from older brains into hers well before she reaches half her adult size. When you are pre-programmed to absorb useful information at a high rate, it is hard to shut out pernicious or damaging information at the same time. With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.”
Dr. Dawkins compares the virus of Christianity (Islam) to a computer virus, stating that,
“Successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it.”
He defines faith as a conviction that doesn’t seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but feels totally compelling and convincing. As well, he points out the fact that the infected believer sees the absence of evidence a virtue, and that this paradoxical idea that lack of evidence is a positive virtue gives the virus it’s ability to replicate itself due to its self-sustaining and self-referential nature. He states that,
“Once the proposition is believed, it automatically undermines opposition to itself. The `lack of evidence is a virtue’ idea could be an admirable sidekick, ganging up with faith itself in a clique of mutually supportive viral programs.”
This also ties into the conviction that “mystery” is a good thing and it’s not virtuous to solve one. Their insolubility should be enjoyed.
The experiences that surround the conversion process are designed to be attractive to the part of the mind that controls fantasies. This is why there are more “conversions” at venues that resemble rock concerts or have smoke and mirror shows like we see on the broadcasts by Televangelists. Millions of dollars are spent on light shows that rival anything seen at a secular event of the same magnitude. The whole process is designed to make “receiving Christ and the Holy Spirit” invoke “warm and fuzzy” feelings. Then these feelings are explained as having a genuine interaction with the divine.
Telling someone who is mentally vulnerable that they have been personally touched by the supernatural is a powerful way to convince them that their religious experience is real, and that it must be reciprocated with a confession of sin and dedication of service to the faith. This serves as the perfect venue to convince the new believer of the validity of doctrine and dogma, in spite of the fact that many of these doctrines have been disproved many years ago. Thus we have self-propagation. Of course, in reality, this experience is a purely physical one that is the result of the stimulation of the temporal lobes of the brain. It can be duplicated in a lab.
July 18, 2012 at 9:42 am Al Stefanelli
“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational Inquiry” - Richard Dawkins
Memetics is an outgrowth of evolutionary psychology that was introduced as a mental content theory by Dr. Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene.” It is directly connected to Darwinian evolution and, in a nutshell, it has to do with how information, called “units,” are replicated and transferred within a given culture. There is a debate among scientists regarding how the replication of these units of information control human behavior and culture and when Dawkins coined the term, he did so in a speculative spirit. However, memes and their connection to human carriers with respect to the phenomenon of religious belief is also supported by other prominent scientists, as well as the renowned philosopher, Daniel Dennett.
A Virus Of The Mind…
In 1991, Richard Dawkins wrote an essay titled “Viruses of the Mind” which used memetics to explain the various characteristics of organised religions. Susan Blackmore, a physiologist who also studies memetics, agrees with Dawkins and Dennett with the definition of a meme being whatever is transferred from one person to another. Memes are replicators with variations within, they compete in our memories for space and for the opportunity to be recopied, but they are not carbon copies. As is with Darwinian evolution, not all of the variants are able to survive because nobody learns exactly the same way as the next person, so they are actually imitations, not copies. The ideas might be the same or similar, but the expression will change and there will be variants of different memes added. This is akin to mutation in Darwinian evolution.
However, mutations in the evolution of certain memes are very high, and are possible even in first generation imitations. In his book, “A Devil’s Chaplain,” Dawkins identifies and explains the differences between the informative memetic process and the controversial memetic process. The cultural process is based on an idea, action or expression with high variances and the informative is more of a self-correcting memetic process, which is highly resistant to evolutionary mutation.
Scott Bidstrup uses a “joke” as an excellent analogy of a meme. Someone tells a joke, which performs the “infection” stage. The joke is retold, which performs the “reproduction” stage. The joke takes on variations, which performs the “mutation” stage. Some viruses are relatively harmless, while others, as we know, can be deadly. A virus may be the means to its own end because eventually it dies out, but what is left in its wake is disastrous. Religions are not living beings, but they are entities, i.e., their self-replicating nature. These entities have the same properties that a virus has via the attribute to use modes that improve its chances for survival, and one of them relies on the direct link between a person’s beliefs and their behavior. This allows these entities the ability to control the behavior of entire societies. These entities, being ideas that have taken on many of the properties of a living organism, are complex and adaptive. They infect the mind’s ability to comprehend the difference between perceived and actual behavior.
The mind virus of religious belief preys on fear, warps instinctive attributes and skews morality. It contradicts responsible behavior, reason and compassion. It retards free will and causes a lack of ability to differentiate between rational and irrational choices. It allows the religionist to exist in a perfectly rational way in many other aspects of their existence in society while the infected area of the mind is stuck in a cyclical delusion.
A virus will attack the most vulnerable area of its host. In society, that area lies within our youth – particularly very young children. This is why there exist so many youth-driven activities within the church. These activities appeal to the societal desires of children to learn through enjoyable experiences. Sunday school lessons for very young children are modeled after kindergarten and primary school. For the older children there are sports camps and field trips. The entirety of the Contemporary Christian Music genre is designed to mirror modern and post-modern secular music. This is adaptation.
When children are not fully educated, they are unable to comprehend the reason and logic behind what they are told. Through evolution, human children are predisposed to adhere to the authority of an adult. This is why the structure of the ‘one teacher – multiple student’ education system continues to succeed in spite of the higher level of retention of a ‘one-on-one’ educational environment.
Suffer The Children…
All of this makes children very easy to infect. This is propagation and vector. The sheer number of children in our public schools is why there exists a vigorous movement amongst the fundamentalists to return prayer and biblical teaching to that venue, as well as illogical and disproved ideologies such as creationism and Intelligent Design. The longer the infection is allowed to infest the host, the more difficult it is to eradicate.
Dr. Richard Dawkins states:
“A human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. Most obviously, she learns the essentials of their language in a matter of months. A large dictionary of words to speak, an encyclopedia of information to speak about, complicated syntactic and semantic rules to order the speaking, are all transferred from older brains into hers well before she reaches half her adult size. When you are pre-programmed to absorb useful information at a high rate, it is hard to shut out pernicious or damaging information at the same time. With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.”
Dr. Dawkins compares the virus of Christianity (Islam) to a computer virus, stating that,
“Successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it.”
He defines faith as a conviction that doesn’t seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but feels totally compelling and convincing. As well, he points out the fact that the infected believer sees the absence of evidence a virtue, and that this paradoxical idea that lack of evidence is a positive virtue gives the virus it’s ability to replicate itself due to its self-sustaining and self-referential nature. He states that,
“Once the proposition is believed, it automatically undermines opposition to itself. The `lack of evidence is a virtue’ idea could be an admirable sidekick, ganging up with faith itself in a clique of mutually supportive viral programs.”
This also ties into the conviction that “mystery” is a good thing and it’s not virtuous to solve one. Their insolubility should be enjoyed.
The experiences that surround the conversion process are designed to be attractive to the part of the mind that controls fantasies. This is why there are more “conversions” at venues that resemble rock concerts or have smoke and mirror shows like we see on the broadcasts by Televangelists. Millions of dollars are spent on light shows that rival anything seen at a secular event of the same magnitude. The whole process is designed to make “receiving Christ and the Holy Spirit” invoke “warm and fuzzy” feelings. Then these feelings are explained as having a genuine interaction with the divine.
Telling someone who is mentally vulnerable that they have been personally touched by the supernatural is a powerful way to convince them that their religious experience is real, and that it must be reciprocated with a confession of sin and dedication of service to the faith. This serves as the perfect venue to convince the new believer of the validity of doctrine and dogma, in spite of the fact that many of these doctrines have been disproved many years ago. Thus we have self-propagation. Of course, in reality, this experience is a purely physical one that is the result of the stimulation of the temporal lobes of the brain. It can be duplicated in a lab.