Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to The problem with Genesis

But what about Genesis?
Robert — (archived)

The depth of your feeling about religion kind of rocked me back in the chair. And despite the subject line, you only mentioned Genesis once in passing. Mainly a diatribe that's uncharacteristically bitter for you.

Lighten up. Religion's done some good along the way. More in the earlier days when it an innovation that rapidly elevated consciousness, especially in the realm of morality, than today (so I'd agree with you in a less violent way that adherence to archaic religions in the modern age can be damaging). I should think that the experience of science and rationality over the last few centuries would at least have taught us some humility. We should refrain from casting stones at people two millenia ago for their passionate beliefs that we hold so wrong today, when science teaches us that paradigms shift and belief systems change--no doubt people two millenia from now will consider everything in both our posts to be the most absolutely wrong-headed nonsense imaginable. And so it goes.

Is religion an instrument of control? You take the cynical view that it's consciously so, but I observe that some meme clusters spread and take hold deeply, and produce a uniformity of thought out of which a controlling hierarchy naturally arises. Christianity and Capitalism and Communism are evangalical belief systems--their memes are determined to spread and multiply through conversion. National Socialism and monarchies and feudalism are conqueror memes. But in all cases those infected with the meme act like religionists, powered by faith and the various ego self-reinforcement mechanism built into the various meme clusters, insular and xenophobic; and the infected population always brings forth prominent leaders whose strong personalities help maintain the coherency of the meme cluster by correcting drift and reinforcing the core memes. The position of alpha is created by the strong social structure of a shared belief system; it can't be avoided in us monkeys, so every belief system has its demagogues.

All strong belief systems--religions and ideologies alike--are controlling systems by their nature. If they weren't, they'd fail, and memetic competition rewards the winners with more cranial liebensraum. Our various belief systems in the modern world are all fiercely competitive and strongly binding because they've evolved over thousands of years of intense competition. If there's one thing we humans excel at, it's binding each other in memetic chains.

The only way to be truly free is to believe nothing.

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