Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2013 05:26PM by steve benson.

This is something I guess I would disagree with. I'm no expert, but it seems to me that every civilization, every culture that's every existed on this planet has had some kind of diety (or more likely dieties) that they worship. As if humans were hard-wired to create a religion, to believe in something outside themselves.

But then, being human, there are always people who will use religion to control others to point of abuse and worse.

I don't have a problem with religion but too many people seem to use it as an excuse to turn off their brains. If people want to follow a religion, fine, but they should be teaching their kids that God gave them a brain and it's an insult to stop using it. That's my rant of the day anyway!

I think I explained this badly. What I'm trying to say is:

I'm not convinced we "catch" religion from our parents or community or wherever, the way we would catch a virus from them. I think it is somehow in our nature to look for a belief system. What we find may be whatever is around us, like someone in Utah finds Mormonism, or someone in Rome finds Catholicism. But no one has to forcefeed it to us -- we are looking for it, to a greater or lesser degree.

It's a meme virus. The mode of transmission is indoctrination. When a Mormon is fully indoctrinated he will refuse to consider other memes. Yes, you should avoid the flu and bad memes too.

I must disagree with Brett4, as Mormonism was force fed to me. It was indigestible, and I vomited it up like a stale vending machine burrito.




Note: A meme is a behavior or thought that spreads from person to person in a culture.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/01/2013 08:51PM by donbagley.

Your point of reference may be limited by your experience with mormonism. It is largely forcefed. But I agree with Brett4 as far as religion in general. I did not grow up in a strict religious home, but I had a natural curiosity and desire to know the meaning of it all, to understand that which is bigger than myself. As did my four siblings. We all chose five different paths. One of them chose mormonism. Profoundly affected the dynamics of our family. That's why I'm here.

Justsayin', my family was similar -- fewer siblings and none of us became a Mormon, but each went their own way. I'm curious, though. How did it affect your family?

Just saying it doesn't HAVE to be forcefed, not that it ISN'T forcefed. Obviously it's forcefed all the time. Shouldn't be, but it is, as an unfortunately large number of ex-mo's can attest.

Exactly. I know a lot of personal stories, including my own, where religion wasn't forcefed, yet we became deeply religious. I see the forcefed stories too, usually not pretty. My sister is the mormon. Her esteem for me has definitely cooled since I rejected her religion. At one point, I was seriously considering it. She was like a second mother to me in childhood but we are not close now.

Yes you bigot. The flu has rights to practice its religion in freedom.

Dawkins says he isn't committed to memes as an explanation for human culture:

http://books.google.com/books?id=OcJY5Dgtz2EC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=%22My+enthusiasm+for+it+was+never,+ever+as+a+contribution+to+the+study+of+human+culture,%22&source=bl&ots=OTdVWUI34s&sig=6d9QN-nCVobSVnMfVzp1AYyu8oQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FYQMUYmaLaPCigK954HoDA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22My%20enthusiasm%20for%20it%20was%20never%2C%20ever%20as%20a%20contribution%20to%20the%20study%20of%20human%20culture%2C%22&f=false

"the term 'meme' caught people's imaginations more effectively than any competing terminology has managed before or since then."

Would that make it a "virus," then, since it was apparently an inadequate representation of what Dawkins intended to express?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/01/2013 11:21PM by robertb.

I've never known exactly what anybody means, although sometimes I might arrive at a good approximation. I'm curious about how you came to believe we could know exactly what another person means?

I was just playing with words. I guess you didn't understand exactly what I meant.

LOL. I know you were playing. You were using the woman-"exactly" (mock) scolding. I've been in trouble enough to catch that tone. :p

Check and mate. Got me :-)

If I dislike the Flying Spaghetti Monster I guess I'm Antipasto.

The coolest thing I learned on this thread was that Dawkins isn't committed to memes as an explanation for human culture. Thanks, robertb. Whew. That makes me feel better about Dawkins as a thinker. While I respect him as a scientist, a great deal of his writing about the anything in humanities seems below undergraduate level work.

I really like what you are saying, Brett4. At best the meme notion is a hypothesis (and a shaky one at that), unlike solid, supported, accepted evolution. And clinging to it has always seemed to me to betray an unscientific approach to the human experience that one would never indulge in looking at the natural world -- unless -- of course -- you are just another tiresome fundamentalist crazy. Are there other explanations for the universality of human religion? That is what a scientist asks. What is the support for each possibility? What are the weaknesses with other explanations, the strengths? Well -- there are plenty of other explanations and they are well worth unpacking, weighing, and debating. Man has been described as the storytelling animal. Man's ability to symbolize and communicate in symbols is crucial to his adaptation and ability to thrive in his niche. Religion is obviously tied to those two human strengths -- and it is impossible to see them as anything but strengths (as man could not survive without them). I suspect that at good conference on religion and history, the meme idea will provoke some repressed smiles at best. Surely one of the most pointless detours of current trends in atheism is that tendency to sneer at all of human history because they dared to speculate on the meaning of human existence, the mystery of death, and how we can best live together as live together or die apart is our human fate.

I also think that atheists are not in a strong position to criticize the memes of others as their own leave something to be desired. The atheists' memes that have cropped up on FB and atheist Net sites (which apparently share some weaknesses with this one) have drawn legitimate criticism. Bad analogies and outright misinformation are passed around the atheist community all the time. I would say one is that the Jesus story is just like the Mithras myth. Try that one in even an undergraduate English paper and you will learn what slapped means in the academic community. I can see the furious red ink now. "How is being carved from a rock like being born of a virgin? Please support your thesis. How is slaying a bull like a ministry of small-time miracles and some of the most cryptic wise sermons ever recorded – before Bob Dylan? Again – I want logic here! There is no bull in the Christ story, although I cannot say the same for this paper."

Yet little posters -- memes -- about it circulate on FB and atheists social Net sites with depressing regularity.

I saw a vid on the net the other day of an articulate young atheist. (By the end I was crushing on him so hard I wanted to send him a valentine, even though, yes, the stories of Valentinus are hardly documented history, and he might have met a martyr's end. Still -- a bunch of red roses to this guy would be nice.) He pointed out that he saw gross inaccuracies and mistakes in atheists' memes on the Net social sites all the time. He cited one about Galileo that used a quote from a priest who had died before Galileo had even been born, and pointed out they had not even bothered to spell Galileo correctly!
So much for the ignorant memes of those believers.
I’m looking for the link to that video.

To me, "meme" is just a concept - a simple definition. It confuses me when people say that memes aren't real and then continue to use the word. If the word didn't represent a real concept, how are people using it to mean something? To say that the meme concept is a faulty meme is just funny.

Memes clearly exist.

People just get in trouble when they take the definition and go too far with it. Or try to apply the concept where it doesn't belong.

But the Internet has clearly shown that memes are real.

Or sure, beat down on the poor influenza virus, while you wave around your complete strains of DNA, while it has to rely only on getting by with only RNA.

Maybe fighting religion is a "virus of the mind" as well... Since you spend so much time doing so.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/02/2013 02:35AM by steve benson.

Yeah, what's with the trolls the last couple of days? Looks like a class assignment or something.

You're over thinking it. The mind virus idea isn't a deep theory of everything. It's just an analogy. I happen to believe it's a good one, though.

This comes up every once in a while here and I just want to address it as openly as possible.

This idea that religion is preprogramed in our genes is hogcock (my new favorite word). Humanity has always gravitated to organized government, does that mean that it must be a genetic propensity? I have a real problem with taking a human behavior like the need for order or the need to be together and saying that this proves we have a "God" gene. I'm not opposed to the idea that we gravitate toward religion, government, or homogeneity because of a genetic coding, I'm just saying to stop saying that it is specific to religion when it isn't.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/02/2013 01:27PM by jacob.

If you have ANY 'anti-influenzian' powers, please send them to me. I've been sick for a week with this shiz..