Meemit ja uskonto

Meemi on käyttökelpoinen käsite uskontoja, ja erityisesti niiden leviämistä, käsiteltäessä.

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'"

http://www.rubinghscience.org/memetics/dawkinsmemes.html


Miten kristitty pelastuu? Siihen tarvitaan vain uskoa. Tämä on erityisen vaarallinen ja toisaalta kummallinenkin oppi/meemi. Jumala/Jeesus arvostaa ihmisessä eniten uskoa. Miksi ihmeessä se on niin tärkeää jumalalle? Se ei ole tärkeää jumalalle (edes sille kuvitteelliselle), vaan se on tärkeää uskonnolle. Se varmistaa uskonnon leviämisen ja säilymisen. Tekemällä uskosta hyveen uskonto selviää helpommin muiden elämänkatsomusten rinnalla. "Usko todisteista, tai niiden puuttumisesta, huolimatta."
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"Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

Blind faith can justify anything.(7) If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die -- on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith."

http://www.rubinghscience.org/memetics/dawkinsmemes.html