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?
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.
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.
True said Rat. Having the military and the church in bed together tends to get the message out.
Quote from: Felix on October 14, 2008, 02:33:18 AM
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?"
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.
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.
Quote from: Ratatosk on October 14, 2008, 02:47:21 AM
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.
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).
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.
From his chapter on "Memory-engineering devices in oral cultures":
QuoteAnthropologists 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.
The Domestication of Religions:
QuoteFolk 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.
QuoteWhat 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.
I really need to read that.
I'll put it on my List. Near the top, I think.
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.
What's the rationale behind 1)?
Surely that would only apply under very select conditions, right?
Quote from: Father Kurt Christ on October 13, 2008, 11:34:52 PM
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?
Perhaps if Judaism and Zoroastrianism had sent out people to discover the New World, they'd be more widespread now. I'm not so sure that the reach of religions today has much to do with the viability of the memes, and has more to do with who, when, and how they were established. And I think if someone is looking for a Religion, they're going to tend to look towards something established and familiar. So I guess what I'm getting at is that Christianity and Islam have had a momentum for the past couple of thousands of year, fueled by penetration into multiple corners of the world. I think that is what makes them more "contagious", their prominence, not necessarily their memes.
Quote from: Cain on October 14, 2008, 02:58:09 PM
What's the rationale behind 1)?
Surely that would only apply under very select conditions, right?
I would think that memes that prevent people from mating could be considered non-beneficial.
Other memes that could be harmful to the individual but not the group might be forced poverty, caste systems, strict non-aggression.
It could be said that some memes perpetuate by preserving the ruling class at the expense of enslaving the lower classes.
Or have I completely misunderstood this?
That was what I meant about select conditions. I was thinking martyrdom, but yes things along that line too.
However, that would also undermine the Dawkins conception of memes and evolution, where the entire purpose is centered around the individual, and not the group.
Which is why I asked the question.
Ah. Gotcha.
I'll just keep my head down until I figure some stuff out.
Quote from: Cain on October 14, 2008, 02:58:09 PM
What's the rationale behind 1)?
Surely that would only apply under very select conditions, right?
I suppose you could consider defenitions of "beneficial." Catholicism prohibits the use of contraceptives, which is generally not beneficial for the mother or the family as a whole, as resources are stretched thinner with each child, yet the potential reduction in quality of life does not damage the propogation of the overall Catholic community.
Quote from: Cain on October 14, 2008, 03:23:27 PM
That was what I meant about select conditions. I was thinking martyrdom, but yes things along that line too.
However, that would also undermine the Dawkins conception of memes and evolution, where the entire purpose is centered around the individual, and not the group.
Which is why I asked the question.
Dennett focused more on a "meme's-eye view". The meme doesn't care if the host lives or dies, as long as the meme gets passed on. And of course, the memeplex of organized religion is, by nature, all about group dynamics. Memes are passed along in very structured ways: rituals, worship services, prayers, holy books, etc. There are certain people ("holy men") who have more control over memes than anyone else, but they always need others to help them spread the memes.
I had never heard anything about memes being centered around individuals (but I haven't read much Dawkins). Maybe you should explain it a little more because I'm not understanding it.
Quote from: Iason Ouabache on October 14, 2008, 04:00:25 PM
Quote from: Cain on October 14, 2008, 03:23:27 PM
That was what I meant about select conditions. I was thinking martyrdom, but yes things along that line too.
However, that would also undermine the Dawkins conception of memes and evolution, where the entire purpose is centered around the individual, and not the group.
Which is why I asked the question.
Dennett focused more on a "meme's-eye view". The meme doesn't care if the host lives or dies, as long as the meme gets passed on. And of course, the memeplex of organized religion is, by nature, all about group dynamics. Memes are passed along in very structured ways: rituals, worship services, prayers, holy books, etc. There are certain people ("holy men") who have more control over memes than anyone else, but they always need others to help them spread the memes.
I had never heard anything about memes being centered around individuals (but I haven't read much Dawkins). Maybe you should explain it a little more because I'm not understanding it.
I think it depends on the memes ;-)
Some memes seem self reliant as you point out, but aspects of WHY a person would accept a meme into their head may have a lot to do with the individual. IN Prometheus Rising, RAW talked about how belief was necessary for survival in tribal societies. That is, the tribe had been infested with memes about Sluggo the Serpentine Lake God or Jove God of War and Shit. Basically, to stay in the tribe, you had to go along with Sluggo and Jove, no matter what your personal opinion on them might have been. At best you could get kicked out of the tribe, at worst someone might kill you. In that day and age, either position was likely a death sentence.
So maybe memes are concerned with survival. Religions are meme-plexes which, through a symbiotic relationship have improved the chance for each memes survival... and humans, tend to accept the memes that infect their tribe or social group perhaps due to ancient survival instinct of the individual...
maybe ;-)
Quote from: Iason Ouabache on October 14, 2008, 04:00:25 PM
Quote from: Cain on October 14, 2008, 03:23:27 PM
That was what I meant about select conditions. I was thinking martyrdom, but yes things along that line too.
However, that would also undermine the Dawkins conception of memes and evolution, where the entire purpose is centered around the individual, and not the group.
Which is why I asked the question.
Dennett focused more on a "meme's-eye view". The meme doesn't care if the host lives or dies, as long as the meme gets passed on. And of course, the memeplex of organized religion is, by nature, all about group dynamics. Memes are passed along in very structured ways: rituals, worship services, prayers, holy books, etc. There are certain people ("holy men") who have more control over memes than anyone else, but they always need others to help them spread the memes.
I had never heard anything about memes being centered around individuals (but I haven't read much Dawkins). Maybe you should explain it a little more because I'm not understanding it.
Here is a section from The Selfish Gene that may help explain what I mean more:
QuoteLike successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entities us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals.
[...]
These stories are simply intended as illustrations of what I mean by altruistic and selfish behaviour at the level of individuals. This book will show how both individual selfishness and individual altruism are explained by the fundamental law that I am calling gene selfishness. But first I must deal with a particular erroneous explanation for altruism, because it is widely known, and even widely taught in schools.
This explanation is based on the misconception that I have already mentioned, that living creatures evolve to do things 'for the good of the species' or 'for the good of the group'. It is easy to see how this idea got its start in biology. Much of an animal's life is devoted to reproduction, and most of the acts of altruistic self-sacrifice that are observed in nature are performed by parents towards their young. 'Perpetuation of the species' is a common euphemism for reproduction, and it is undeniably a consequence of reproduction. It requires only a slight over-stretching of logic to deduce that the 'function' of reproduction is 'to' perpetuate the species. From this it is but a further short false step to conclude that animals will in general behave in such a way as to favour the perpetuation of the species. Altruism towards fellow members of the species seems to follow.
This line of thought can be put into vaguely Darwinian terms. Evolution works by natural selection, and natural selection means the differential survival of the 'fittest'. But are we talking about the fittest individuals, the fittest races, the fittest species, or what.' For some purposes this does not greatly matter, but when we are talking about altruism it is obviously crucial. If it is species that are competing in what Darwin called the struggle for existence, the individual seems best regarded as a pawn in the game, to be sacrified when the greater interest of the species as a whole requires it. To put it in a slightly more respectable way, a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, maybe less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first. Therefore the world
becomes populated mainly by groups consisting of self-sacrificing individuals. This is the theory of 'group selection', long assumed to be
true by biologists not familiar with the details of evolutionary theory, brought out into the open in a famous book by V. C. Wynne-Edwards, and popularized by Robert Ardrey in The Social Contract. The orthodox alternative is normally called 'individual selection', although I personally prefer to speak of gene selection.
The quick answer of the 'individual selectionist' to the argument just put might go something like this. Even in the group of altruists, there will almost certainly be a dissenting minority who refuse to make any sacrifice. If there is just one selfish rebel, prepared to exploit the altruism of the rest, then he, by definition, is more likely than they are to survive and have children. Each of these children will tend to inherit his selfish traits. After several generations of this natural selection, the 'altruistic group' will be over-run by selfish individuals, and will be indistinguishable from the selfish group. Even if we grant the improbable chance existence initially of pure altruistic groups without any rebels, it is very difficult to see what is to stop selfish individuals migrating in from neighbouring selfish groups, and, by inter-marriage, contaminating the purity of the altruistic groups.
The individual-selectionist would admit that groups do indeed die out, and that whether or not a group goes extinct may be influenced by the behaviour of the individuals in that group. He might even admit that if only the individuals in a group had the gift of foresight they could see that in the long run their own best interests lay in restraining their selfish greed, to prevent the destruction of the whole group. How many times must this have been said in recent years to the working people of Britain? But group extinction is a slow process compared with the rapid cut and thrust of individual competition. Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists. The citizens of Britain may or may not be blessed with foresight, but evolution is blind to the future.
Although the group-selection theory now commands litte support within the ranks of those professional biologists who understand evolution, it does have great intuitive appeal.
Applying the same logic to memes, it would seem that altruistic memes would only really prosper under the controlled conditions of extermination of dissenting memes - a very early and primitive form of social engineering.
Edit: I fully accept I may be stretching the exact evolutionary model here to somewhere it does not quite fit.
So then, Cain, would you say that the 'altruistic' religious memes that were propagated by Alexander the Great " I'ma conquer your nation, but worship however you want" created an environment that made it less difficult for Christianity's "There is Only One True Religion" to take advantage of these less selfish memplexes?
I'm also thinking about how this was abused by the Apostle Paul in reference to "Agnostos Theos" or the Unknown God worshiped by the Greeks.
Quote
22Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
'Unknown God' seems like a pretty altruistic meme, Pauls memes were surely not altruistic.
Quote from: Ratatosk on October 14, 2008, 04:26:48 PM
So then, Cain, would you say that the 'altruistic' religious memes that were propagated by Alexander the Great " I'ma conquer your nation, but worship however you want" created an environment that made it less difficult for Christianity's "There is Only One True Religion" to take advantage of these less selfish memplexes?
I'm also thinking about how this was abused by the Apostle Paul in reference to "Agnostos Theos" or the Unknown God worshiped by the Greeks.
Quote
22Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
'Unknown God' seems like a pretty altruistic meme, Pauls memes were surely not altruistic.
It seems likely. I know both Persia and Rome tended to be very flexible on religion, during large periods of their history. Alexander actually took his policies from Cyrus the Great (who famously allowed the Jews to worship their own religion in the Bible) and thus religious tolerance spread from the boundaries of Rome to the border of India. Ironically, the same territory where Christianity and Islam managed to entrench themselves so well.
However, I am wondering more how this works on the individual person level. Does individual-selection hold true for memes under most circumstances, or is it more complex, and thus more open to the benefits of
competition cooperation, damnit? That is where I am uncertain.
For some reason this brought to mind a documentary I watched last evening. It was on the topic of Earthships, something I'm particularly interested in (and have been for some years). The concept of a self-sustaining home, built of recycled materials and completely off the grid is particularly attractive. However, along with the radical new design in housing, the environmentally friendly methods of building etc... what I found surprising, both in books on the topic and in the interviews in the documentary were the memes tied to the concept.
For most of the people interviewed, this wasn't just a house. It was a living thing, a symbiotic relationship between a living house, with water flowing through its veins etc and its inhabitants. The books on the subject are filled with pseudo spiritual memes that seem to have spread throughout this community of Earthship builders. I also found it interesting that for the most part, these people help each other build their homes. There's no requirement that they help their neighbors, there's no demand from the community, but everyone seems to desire to help bring another Earthship to life. Considering the back breaking labor required, I was surprised.
So rather than personal gain, in this instance (and maybe in some religious instances) the ZEAL of the person promoting the meme may support altruistic action. Some popular forms of Christianity seem rather altruistic and have survived for centuries, like the Universalists, for example. However, most Universalists I know, are very zealous about their altruism... It's almost as if the dogmatic aspects of run of the mill protestantism are supplanted by this zealous altruism.
So perhaps there are multiple ways that a meme can survive, via both selfish and altruistic means?
I dunno, maybe this is a tangent.
Quote from: Father Kurt Christ on October 13, 2008, 11:34:52 PM
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?
I think Christianity has a lot going for it, but mainly, it was in the right place at the right time.
I don't think there was any way to predict that this particular cult in this particular part of the world would have such a great influence on our species. I think there's a very complicated cybernetic interaction between religion, economy, sex, and power which led to Christianity's predominance. I know that's kind of a non-answer, but it's hard to dissect causality relating to something so big and so old.
Quote from: CainHowever, I am wondering more how this works on the individual person level. Does individual-selection hold true for memes under most circumstances, or is it more complex, and thus more open to the benefits of competition cooperation, damnit? That is where I am uncertain.
This was explored in the literature on the Prisoner's Dilemma (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A509690). The basic question is, "How can co-operation emerge among rational, self-interested individuals without there being any form of central authority imposed on them?" Hofstadter wrote a lot about this, and it left a big mark on me when I first read about it.
Quote from: Cramulus on October 16, 2008, 01:08:20 AM
This was explored in the literature on the Prisoner's Dilemma (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A509690). The basic question is, "How can co-operation emerge among rational, self-interested individuals without there being any form of central authority imposed on them?" Hofstadter wrote a lot about this, and it left a big mark on me when I first read about it.
That whole dilemma seems weird and artificial to me.
Game theory is like that. For a real head trip, look at the Pirate's Dilemma. (How should a captain divvy up the loot on the theory that if the crew votes against it he gets tossed overboard).
Which I still claim the solution to is BS, if the previous guy got tossed overboard you aren't going to try the same strategy, so considering the case where the same strategy is used for the next guy makes no sense.
It just doesn't seem to take the fluidity of human thinking into account. People do stuff for any number of reasons, some of which they can't even name, and to try to jam something so amorphous as co-operation into soemthing so narrow is...fundamentally flawed, imo. Also, claiming supreme rationality is the solution denies that even rational people have subconscious motivations.
I dont' know, reading that page just made me feel like it was written by robots who don't understand people. Or, you know, aspie nerd shut-ins...
It's more of a logic puzzle than a sociological model.
Quote from: Felix on October 16, 2008, 07:41:34 AM
It's more of a logic puzzle than a sociological model.
BZZZZZZZT! Back of the class.
Game Theory is one of the
very first theories you learn in the social sciences. Among other things, its application was in the use of US nuclear strategy in the Cold War. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others.
RB, it may not surprise you to learn that Game Theory was massively advanced by a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered from clinical depression. Thus its underlying philosophical premises are somewhat suspect, to say the least.
Quote from: Rabid Badger of God on October 16, 2008, 01:22:14 AM
Quote from: Cramulus on October 16, 2008, 01:08:20 AM
This was explored in the literature on the Prisoner's Dilemma (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A509690). The basic question is, "How can co-operation emerge among rational, self-interested individuals without there being any form of central authority imposed on them?" Hofstadter wrote a lot about this, and it left a big mark on me when I first read about it.
That whole dilemma seems weird and artificial to me.
Yeah, the scenario is kind of unreal. but the core idea:
cooperate? or fuck over everyone but me?comes up pretty often
I read about an example in buddhism. Zen never caught on in china because it was followed up by another sect, that taught that if you spoke a certain mantra at any time, you automatically were saved. That's SO much easier than meditating for years and getting hit with sticks to attain enlightenment.