Success of some religious memes versus others...

[Kurt Christ]

Not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but, what is it about certain religions (specifically Christianity and Islam) that makes them so much more contagious than other, fairly similar religons (say, Judaism and Zoroastrianism)? Any thoughts, and any ideas on how to use it?

[Cainad (dec.)]

Some religions make evangelism and converting the unbelievers a critical part of the faith, others don't.

... and I just used up my 2 cents.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

What Cainad said. Judaism began as a nationalistic religion, you were born in or maybe you converted if you wanted to live there, but it wasn't a useful religion for anyone else. It was about the Jews, by the Jews and For the Jews. Christianity took it to the Gentiles and then added Evangelism.

Also, I think the army backing the meme had a lot to do with its spread or lack thereof.

[Jasper]

True said Rat.  Having the military and the church in bed together tends to get the message out.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

True said Rat.  Having the military and the church in bed together tends to get the message out.

Yep... when the guys with the swords say "Do you love Jesus/Allah?" people with fewer swords tend to say, "Ah, sure?"

[Cainad (dec.)]

In the same vein, missionaries. Christian missionaries were often among the first to have contact with new peoples whenever a European country happened upon one.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

However, I do think that both sets of religious memes appeal strongly to the human state of existence currently.

1. Why is there evil? Pass the blame to Satan
2. Why do I do bad things? Pass the blame to Sin
3. What happens after death? You Live Forever...

Those are pretty powerful memes.

[Jasper]

However, I do think that both sets of religious memes appeal strongly to the human state of existence currently.

1. Why is there evil? Pass the blame to Satan
2. Why do I do bad things? Pass the blame to Sin
3. What happens after death? You Live Forever...

Those are pretty powerful memes.

They're powerful memes because people are generally incapable of understanding the concept of "Not existing" the way they're used to.  It doesn't make intuitive sense that your consciousness can merely cease and never come back.

Evil and bad things too.  People still think that by sacrificing a lamb on an altar they're cleared for Heaven.  They just do it with words and symbols and ideas, because real goats are a nuisance.

[Cain]

Look at the meme evolutionarily (is that a word?). How does the meme improve both survivability and self-propogate?


Survival = militaries and inquisitions, social stigma, particular reference to an Other within the doctrine

Propagation = social services, providing aid to the poor, co-opting of teaching centres, useful vehicle of ambition for dissatisfied nobility (in most feudalistic or caste systems, honours and titles are only bestowed on the firstborn, meaning other children of the rich and powerful may gravitate to the religion), make alliance with sovereign political power structure (ie include justifying doctrines of rule and political order).

[Iason Ouabache]

Most of Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell" is about the memetics of religion.  I will look through my copy of it and try to pull out some relevant passages later on. 

[Iason Ouabache]

From his chapter on "Memory-engineering devices in oral cultures":

Anthropologists and historians of religion have theorized about the meaning and function of religious ritual for generations, usually from blinkered perspectives that ignore the evolutionary background. Before we look at speculations about rituals as symbolic expressions of one deep need or belief or another, we should consider the case that can be made for rituals as memory-enhancement processes, designed by cultural evolution (and not by any conscious designers!) to improve the copying fidelity of the very process of meme transmission they ensure. One of the clearest lessons of evolutionary biology is that early extinction lies in the future of any lineage in which the copying machinery breaks down, or even just degrades a little. Without high-fidelity copying, any design improvements that happen to occur in a lineage will tend to be frittered away almost immediately. Hard-won gains accumulated over many generations can be lost in a few faulty replications, the precious fruits of R & D evaporating overnight. So we can be sure that would-be religious traditions that have no good ways of preserving their designs reliably over the centuries are doomed to oblivion.

We can observe today the birth and swift death of cults, as the early adherents lose faith or lose interest and drift away, leaving hardly a trace after a few years. Even when members of such a group fervently want to keep it going, their desires will be thwarted unless they avail themselves of the technologies of replication. Today, writing (not to mention videotape and other high-tech recording media) provides the obvious information highway to use. And from the earliest days of writing, there has been a keen appreciation of the need not only to protect the sacred documents from damage and decay, but to copy them over and over, minimizing the risk of loss by ensuring that multiple copies were distributed around. For many centuries before the invention of movable type, which made possible for the first time the mass production of identical copies, roomfuls of scribes, shoulder to shoulder at their writing desks, took dictation from a reader and thus turned one frail and dog-eared copy into dozens of fresh new copies—a copy machine made of people. Since the originals from which the copies were made have mostly turned to dust in the meantime, without the efforts of these scribes we would have no reliable texts for any of the literature of antiquity, sacred or secular, no Old Testament, no Homer, no Plato and Aristotle, no Gilgamesh. The earliest known copies of Plato's dialogues still in existence, for instance, were created centuries after his death, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi gospels (Pagels, 1979) are copies of texts that were composed hundreds of years earlier.

[Iason Ouabache]

The Domestication of Religions:

Folk religions emerge out of the daily lives of people living in small groups, and share common features the world over. How and when did these metamorphose into organized religions? There is a general consensus among researchers that the big shift responsible was the emergence of agriculture and the larger settlements that this made both possible and necessary. Researchers disagree, however, on what to emphasize in this major transition. The creation of nonportable food stockpiles, and the resultant shift to fixed residence, permitted the emergence of an unprecedented division of labor (Seabright, 2004, is especially clear about this), and this in turn gave rise to markets, and opportunities for ever more specialized occupations. These new ways for people to interact created novel opportunities and novel needs. When you find that you have to deal on a daily basis with people who are not your close kin, the prospect of a few like-minded people forming a coalition that is quite different from an extended family must almost always present itself, and often be an attractive option.

What I now want to suggest is that, alongside the domestication of animals and plants, there was a gradual process in which the wild (self-sustaining) memes of folk religion became thoroughly domesticated. They acquired stewards. Memes that are fortunate enough to have stewards, people who will work hard and use their intelligence to foster their propagation and protect them from their enemies, are relieved of much of the burden of keeping their own lineages going. In extreme cases, they no longer need to be particularly catchy, or appeal to our sensual instincts at all. The multiplication-table memes, for instance, to say nothing of the calculus memes, are hardly crowd-pleasers, and yet they are duly propagated by hardworking teachers—meme shepherds—whose responsibility it is to keep these lineages strong. The wild memes of language and folk religion, in other words, are like rats and squirrels, pigeons and cold viruses—magnificently adapted to living with us and exploiting us whether we like them or not. The domesticated memes, in contrast, depend on help from human guardians to keep going.

[Cain]

I really need to read that.

I'll put it on my List. Near the top, I think.

[Iason Ouabache]

I can't find good concise passages about it, but he makes a couple of other really good points about memes:

1) Not every meme is beneficial to it's host.
2) Often times the meme is driving the host and not the other way around.
3) The strongest memes are the ones that are self-perpetuating and able to shroud itself in mystery.  (DON'T QUESTION THIS MEME, EVER!).  Threats of hellfire/rewards of eternal life seem to help too.
4) The longest lasting memes are able to adapt to its environment multiple times.
5) People are more than willing to commit attrocities for a very strong meme.

[Cain]

What's the rationale behind 1)?

Surely that would only apply under very select conditions, right?