the timboucher experience

This is an addition to an older post about religions and memeplexes. Again, I basically dislike the terminology and viewpoint of memetics, but that doesn’t mean once in a while they don’t say something interesting:

When we look at religions from a meme’s eye view we can understand why they have been so successful. These religious memes did not set out with an intention to succeed. They were just behaviours, ideas and stories that were copied from one person to another in the long history of human attempts to understand the world. They were successful because they happened to come together into mutually supportive gangs that included all the right tricks to keep them safely stored in millions of brains, books and buildings, and repeatedly passed on to more. They evoked strong emotions and strange experiences. They provided myths to answer real questions and the myths were protected by untestability, threats, and promises. They created and then reduced fear to create compliance, and they used the beauty, truth and altruism tricks to help their spread. That is why they are still with us, and why millions of people’s behaviour is routinely controlled by ideas that are either false or completely untestable.

• Religions as Memeplexes
• Memes & story engrams
• Memes & story engrams
• The Religion of Buying
• About my reading last night: mind viruses