Spire Comics

What you see here is isn't some sort of neo-Nazi propaganda; rather, it's Christian propaganda.

I try not to be too hard on the Christian urge to evangelize. I appreciate the fact that their world view tells them that humanity is trapped in the metaphorical equivalent of a burning house with only one exit and that they feel that it's their moral duty to try to rescue us from that conflagration. Viewed from that perspective, evangelists and missionaries really are trying to do something moral, never mind that the rest of us get awfully tired of trying to be pulled from a burning building that we don't believe actually exists.

Be that as it may, some methods of evangelization take such absurd forms in their attempt to "reach" people that it's nearly impossible not to point and laugh. A particular egregious form of this is that of Christian comics. I have no doubt that we're all familiar with the works of Jack Chick, but Chick ministries aren't the only ones who've attempted to spread the word of Jesus through crappy art, stilted dialog and plots that a pre-schooler should find simplistic. A lesser known -- but still weirdly fascinating -- company is Spire Comics who ran a line of Christian themed comics such as the above "Hansi: The Girl Who Loved the Swastika" -- about a girl who initially loved the Nazis but eventually came to love Jesus -- as well as many others including quite a few surreal Archie Comics cross-overs.

I found a good fan site that has PDF versions of many of their comics. If you like reading Chick tracts (for a suitably broad definition of "like") I'm sure you'll enjoy reading these as well.

Unstructured Glossographia

The Shakers were an odd religious group by even the standards of most of the utopian movements of the 19th century (and believe me, there were quite a lot of odd ducks in that group). They are most well known for their absolute prohibition on sexual intercourse, which is even more remarkable given the longevity of the group which managed to last well over a century via the acquisition of new converts (indeed, you can still find the occasional neo-Shaker).

Beyond the celibacy edict, however, the Shakers had other interesting and unusual traits. Above is an example of Shaker glossographia, which is the written version of glossolalia (aka "speaking in tongues") which should be familiar to anyone whose had any exposure to Pentecostalism (which is, arguably, the last and most successful of the Protestant Utopian movements).

Ubuweb Ethnopoetics has a good collection of Shaker glossographics. While I, of course, don't believe that there's anything genuinely divine in their compositions, I find it interesting to contemplate the ecstatic states of mind that led to their creation.

Unstructured Scriptures

Long has the world wondered what the Bible would be like if it were to be told in Lego form. At long last our prayers have been answered and we shall wonder no more.

Unstructured Supper

Here we have The Last Supper, reimagined as a Final Fantasy game.

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Attribution unknown.

Unstructured Inspiration

When I write an essay, such as the recent one on Omnipresence, I like to think that I'm inspiring my readers in some way. Mind you, I wasn't expecting the inspiration to take quite this form.

(LOLGod compliments of Rob Berry)

The Story of Job

I decided to re-write the biblical story of Job as an in-game chat:

S: Hey God, ur teh suxx0rs!
G: Shut up n00b!
S: lol! No 1 lieks u!
G: Shut UP! job likes me
S: roflol! that's only 'cause u twink him
G: O yeah?
S: yeh!
G: ok, go ahead an haxx0r him
S: hey job, I pwn yoo!
J: whatever
S: **PWNED!**
J: OMG! WFT!
S: hahahah!
J: this sux! hey god, WTF?
G: shut up, or i'll pwn you even harder
J: okay, srry
G: kkthnx
S: hey! wtf is that!
G: lolerskatez! i win!
S: u are such a cheater!
G: whatever, dw33b

A Dork Tale

It came to pass, one day, that the Lord of Dorkness, who was having a horrible snit, called together his three favored minions.

"Attend to me, O minions," said the Dork Lord, "for we have a grave situation. Sir Mix-a-Lot's accursed song, Baby Got Back, is still cool!"

His minions gasped and exclaimed, "But how can that be? Did we not commission a Latin version to rob it of its coolness?"

"Alas, our plan has backfired. People are enjoying the Latin version as hip, post-ironic geek chic!

"Oh, the post-irony!," they cried.

There was a great wailing and gnashing of braces and retainers, then, but the Dork One held up his hand and said, "Enough! We must try again. Minion 1, what do you suggest?"

Minion 1 pushed up his thick rimmed glasses by the masking tape that bound the cloven halves of it together and said, "Let us create a new version. A version sung by a talentless white guy with a ridiculous street name."

"Ah yes," said the Lord of Dorkness, "the Vanilla Ice gambit. This is good, but it is not enough. Minion 2, speak!"

Minion 2 fidgited with his slide rule for a minute before saying, "We must also make a video. A bad video with horrible production value."

"This, too, is good, but not good enough. What of you, Minion 3?"

Minion 3, who was called the Anti-Fonzie, straightened his bow tie and took a hit from his inhaler as he thought deeply. Finally he spoke and said, "My Lord, we must change the song. We must remove all traces of fun and sexiness from it. Let us make it wholesome, and not merely wholesome, but a song about religious values. Let us turn it into a Christian rap song about..."

He paused and pondered.

"Let us make it about reading the Bible!"

The Dork Lord chuckle/snorted and said, "My true and faithful servants, you have pleased me well. Let us create this uncool thing. We shall call it Baby Got Book".

And so it came to be.

Religion in America

I found this chart of religious belief by county. Before anyone writes in, there's a few things that bother me. First of all is that the percentages are based off of adherants of "religious bodies that participated in a study by Association of Staticians of American Religious Bodies". Even assuming no bias, I don't think that attendence in church / temple / what have you can be considered an accurate gauge of belief or, for that matter, non-belief. I also don't like the granularity of the results and the numerical divisions seem odd, to me.

Be that as it may, this does, more or less, match my expectations, for whatever that's worth. I suggest taking it with a grain of salt but I find it interesting, all the same.

Some Brief Thoughts on the Current Cartoon Controversy

Those who have been reading this blog know that I am both a liberal as well as an ex-Muslim and I want to address this current controversy from both perspectives. Some will look at the "ex-" prefix and assume that I must be hostile towards Islam, so I think that I should first clarify my stance on the religion.

I do, in fact, have quite a few issues with the core scriptures of Islam, by which I mean the Qu'ran and the Hadiths (which are the sayings of Muhammad). There is a lot in there that should be offensive to any advocate of civilized society. However, there is a difference between the scriptures of a religion and the practice of that religion.

Objectively, Islamic scripture isn't any worse than Jewish scripture (and, thus, by extension, Christian Scripture). If you actually read through the Torah, it would be hard to find a document that is a better example of bloody-minded xenophobia, misogyny, and barbarism. One can, of course, take the detached stance that the books of the Torah were written by a primitive people who lived in a world where these traits were the norm -- and that is so -- but the fact remains that many people consider them to have modern relevance.

If I only looked at Jewish scripture, I would presume that Judaism is an abominable religion. This would be very short sighted, however. The vast majority of modern Jews don't adhere to a strict practice or interpretation of their scriptures. It would be hard to find many rabbis who would suggest, for instance, that a disobedient child should be stoned to death, or that woman should be considered taboo during their menses. In fact, over the millennia, Judaism has liberalized. To be sure, there are still conservative pockets of orthodoxy and ultra-orthodoxy, which I would say need to be judged independently, but the religion, as a whole, no longer reflects the literal mind-set of its scriptures.

My point is that the practice of a religion is far more important that the strict content of the religion. You can find examples of this in any religious tradition. It would be foolish to suppose that modern, post Vatican II, Catholicism is the same thing as the Catholicism of the 12th century. It's would be foolish to think that 21st century Mormons are cut from the same cloth at their 19th century counterparts. The Buddhism of a modern adherent of Zen is not the same thing as the Buddhism practiced by the Buddha, himself.

Religions change and evolve. Unfortunately, just as in biology, not all evolution is progressive. Islam has a marvelous history. This is one of the things that attracted me to the religion. During its golden era, Islam represented the pinnacle of scientific, mathematical, and philosophic inquiry in the world. It was contact with the Islamic world (as well as compulsive archiving by Catholic monks) that helped to lift us out of our own dark ages. It was this era of Islam that produced the remarkable scientist-philosopher-poet-theologian, Omar Khayyám who wrote one of the most amazing works of literature the world has ever seen, The Rubáiyát.

Even in Khayyám's own era, however, there was a politically influential orthodoxy. That orthodox movement, however, was largely kept in check. That is no longer the case. Modern Islam has become a radicalized religion. Before someone accuses me of generalizing, I will acknowledge that there are moderate and even liberal movements within Islam. Indeed, if you follow Islam far enough to the left you end up at Sufism which is, in many ways, comparable to modern Buddhism in terms of tolerance and overall progressiveness. These cases not withstanding, though, it is accurate to say that the modern Islamic zeitgeist is anything but progressive. In fact, what passes for moderation in Islam would be considered very reactionary by western standards.

Allow me to frame this in terms that are personally meaningful to me. I am an Islamic apostate. Islamic law (a.k.a., Sharia) has some sections that pertain to apostates. Many Islamic clerics would argue that I should be put to death for leaving the religion. This is the general conservative stance. A few conservatives would argue that the fact that I am living outside of Dar-al-Islam (meaning the Islamic world) provides an extenuating circumstance that may justify the sparing of my life so long as I live in exile from that world (which, I confess, isn't much of a burden to me). The moderate stance is that I deserve punishment, but that punishment should be reserved to Allah who will, justifiably, throw me in the worst sections of hellfire. Since I'm not particularly concerned about going to Hell, I'm more than willing to accept the moderate stance but it is critical to understand that this stance isn't driven by any sense of mercy or civilized restraint. They simply don't think that my punishment should be part of their jurisdiction. I would have to go very far to the left of mainstream Islam before I found a scholar who would dare to suggest that renouncing my religion was my right as well as my conscientious duty given that I could no longer sustain rational belief in it.

The bottom line is that I don't hate Islam. Islam, like any other religion, boils down to how it's practiced. What I do hate is how Islam is being practiced by the bulk of its modern adherents. Fundamentalism has become the norm in the Islamic world. Strict interpretations of Sharia are the official practice of too many countries. It is a system of law that is, literally, medieval. Under Sharia people can, and are, killed in barbaric ways for offenses that civilized countries wouldn't even consider crimes, anymore (such as adultery). It is a system that makes it easy for women to be raped (because it requires multiple witnesses to the actual event) but extremely difficult for them to establish a right to their property or the custody of their children. It is a system where a man can divorce his wife simply by saying "I divorce you" three times in a row. (There was a recent debate as to whether this could be done via instant messaging!)

Many liberals have embraced what I consider to be a naive multiculturalism. I want to emphasize that I think that a limited multicultural world-view can be a healthy thing. Many of the western excesses and atrocities of the 19th and earlt-20th century were driven by a strict euro-centrism that failed to accept that any other cultural model could have any validity what so ever. It is a good thing to, at least, try to understand why other cultures are the way that they are and to carry a default presumption of respect for divergent cultural standards. Where multiculturalism fails is when it takes that default presumption as a mandate to respect other culture's practices no matter what.

I have written an extensive essay on the subject of relativism vs. absolutism. To quickly summarize it, while I reject the stance that there is a single, absolute moral template that applies to all cultures at all times, I do believe that different moral standards can be assessed on the basis of objective criteria. To give an extreme example, a culture that allows its citizens to freely kill one another would quickly collapse into anarchy. As such, murder is objectively wrong for a civilization because it would quickly lead to anarchy. When I wrote the essay I deliberately didn't go into detail on what criteria I would use. I merely wanted to establish that the idea of objectively evaluating cultures didn't require one to embrace a theory of absolute morality and conduct.

I would like to now suggest that two such measures should be the happiness and prosperity of a culture. I submit that a culture whose citizens are happy is more stable than a culture whose citizens are miserable and that the more happiness enjoyed by the overall population, the more stable it is. In like measure, I would suggest that prosperity serves a similar function. It is necessary to note that happiness and prosperity are not the same thing and that a country can have an abundance of one while having a deficit of the other. I would, finally, suggest that the abstract goal of freedom is a meta-philosophy that tends to increase both happiness and prosperity and, thus, one that can be objectively supported.

There are many people on the left who are defending the outrage of the Islamic world over the cartoons of Muhammad published by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. They argue that even though they support the notion of freedom, in the abstract, they feel that the paper acted inappropriately and irresponsibly because the cartoons are culturally offensive. One claim that I've seen made, again and again, is that freedom carries with it responsibilities and that someone who can't use their freedoms responsibly should not have them. I believe that this is a dangerous stance.

It is, essentially, a variation of the argument that one's freedom of speech does not permit one to shout fire in a crowded theater. The theory is that publishing these cartoons is a deliberate act of provocation that is intended to incite violence and, thus, morally equivalent to the aforementioned act of fire-shouting.

I do not accept this interpretation. When someone shouts fire in a crowded theater, the resulting panic is caused by a rational response to disinformation. It is a fabrication that denies other people the freedom to make a rational decision as to whether to stay seated or to rush to the exits. A more appropriate expression of the theory, I believe, is that you may not exercise your freedom in such a way as to fundamentally curtail the freedoms of others.

I believe that the current crisis is disanalogous. The rioters are not rioting because their freedoms are being hampered. They are rioting because their sensibilities are being hampered. Rather than shouting fire, it's more like shouting tuna with a resulting vegetarian rampage. I believe that this is where naive multiculturalism comes into play. Those multiculturalists who believe that all cultures are equally valid and equally good are compelled, by their own philosophy, to assert that the rioting Muslims are justified in their actions because their culture forbids depictions of the prophet. They believe that our own culture's love of free speech isn't any more important than their culture's religious teachings.

Of course, a consistent application of this view would imply that both parties are equally justified. Jyllands-Posten is right to publish offensive cartoons, and the Islamic world is justified to throw a world-scale hissy-fit over it. Curiously, naive multiculturalists are rarely consistent when evaluating their own culture. Since this version of multiculturalism is largely Western, they tend to hold the West to a higher standard than the rest of the world, insisting that we embrace a meta-philosophy of tolerance towards other cultures. I suspect that this inconsistent stance is ultimately rooted in guilt over the West's (objectively atrocious) history of imperialism and cultural suppression.

While I agree that tolerance is, in general, a good thing, I also think that it is easily misapplied. It is one thing (and a good thing) to tolerate a difference of religious belief. It is, however, not a good thing to allow that tolerance to extend to the point where one is compromising one's own freedoms in the name of said tolerance. More to the point, I will submit that freedom of expression is better than respecting the icons of various religions. The reason for this is that there are no end to the things that people consider iconic, but there are definite ends to our ability to say what we believe to be true.

Here is the real danger of imposing restrictions on religious expression in the name of cultural sensitivity and "responsibility". If we condemn Jyllands-Posten for these publications and if we pass rules and regulations to prevent this from happening again, we set a precedent. We would send a message to the world that says that, although we embrace freedom of speech, we'll limit it if you get sufficiently offended. This tells everyone who has a belief that they hold dear (and there are no end to them) that if they act belligerently enough to defend that belief we will, of our own free will, muzzle ourselves so as to prevent offense. In other words, we will be providing an incentive to all the fundamentalists of the world (religious and otherwise) to take up arms whenever we tread on doctrines that they consider dear. The end result will be that, for the sake of sensitivity and responsible expression, we will allow ourselves to be silenced by degrees until we reach a point where we can say nothing at all for fear of offending anyone at all. In the end, we will allow ourselves to be deprived of a commodity that I believe has much more objective value than any of the dogmas that we would be supposedly respecting.

I do not believe that we can let this happen no matter how outraged the Islamic (or any other segment of the) world becomes at our expressions. The question should not be whether Jyllands-Posten was deliberately offensive, nor should it be whether Jyllands-Posten was acting responsibly. The question should be whether or not we consider the right to offend to be something worth defending. Those who think it isn't should be aware that the right to offend is nothing less than a synonym for the right to speak out at all.

Off-site Essay: The Ethics of Belief

What we should think of a shipowner who has an old ship in need of repairs. The captain, through a variety of rationalizations, manages to sincerely convince himself that the ship is seaworthy and leases her to a group of immigrants who, alas, go down in the ocean. Should we condemn him? Should we have condemned him even if the ship had safely reached it destination?

If you've been reading this blog for any amount of time, you'll have noticed that I have a shameless tendency to inflict philosophy upon the masses.

Let's face it, philosophy has a bad reputation. The impression that people have is that it is dry, dull and, too often, a pointless exercise is sophistry. I don't know if my own amature efforts have done much to dispell this impression. This week, for the offsite essay, I thought that I'd provide a link to a philosophical essay that I believe should.

The essay in question was written by William K. Clifford back in 1877; however, the subject of the essay, which is titled The Ethics of Belief, is, I think, perfectly relevant to modern audiences. The essay is also thoroughly readable and filled with interesting examples.

I hope that you will find it thought-provoking and enjoyable.

Off-site Essay: Life In Our Anti-Christian America

I, honestly, don't have a problem with the majority of Christians in my country. In my experience, most people, of whatever faith, Christian or otherwise, have a live and let live attitude that serves the plurality of our culture well. Generally, people only take up religious arms when a hand-full of hot-button issues come up leaving religion to private considerations at most other times.

Unfortunately, there are vocal minorities who make it their mission to rake muck, nor am I singling out Christian groups. Trust me, there are atheist organizations out there that make me feel just as queasy as any of the strident Christian groups. Never the less, there is one tactic that Christian groups often employ that does especially set my teeth on edge: the tactic of claiming that Christians are a persecuted minority in the United States.

The claim is absurd on the face of it. According to the CIA Factbook, Christians comprise a good 79% of the population (77% if you want to exclude Mormons, though I don't see the logic of doing so). Atheists and other non-religious groups make up a mere 10% of the population. In spite of these figures, there are groups that insist that Christians are being persecuted by atheists. One imagines a lion claiming to be persecuted by a mouse.

To highlight the absurdity of this, Rob Berry created a wonderful bit of satire called "Life In Our Anti-Christian America". It is a very ironic list of the ways that Chrstians are being subject to discrimination and marginalization. It includes such items as:

• Nearly all of our elected public officials are atheists; they even have to swear on a copy of Darwin's "Origin of Species" in order to take office.
• All of our money has the atheistic slogan "We do not trust in God" printed on it.
• While atheists hold huge rallies in 25,000-seat amphitheatres, Christians are so few in number that they can only dream of holding such rallies.
• Most gravestones in America are engraved with pentagrams; those few graves which are engraved with crosses usually end up being vandalized.

The list has 218 entries and would have had more if Rob hadn't stopped taking submissions. It's been a while since it's been updated so some of the items may seem a bit dated and there are no entries for such current controveries as the Shiavo case. Never the less, the list is a rather stinging rebuke to the supposition that Christians are, in any sense, at the mercy of the atheist minority.

Contruct

We decided to build a god.

We built it out of wire, string and clay,
And some transcendent goo
That we found lying on the beach.

It flashed into luminescence
Brighter and more beautiful
Than the sum of a thousand days,
Filling our hearts with joys unnamed.

It proclaimed Itself our creator
And cursed thunder at our denials.

It told us that we were wretched
And unworthy of Its love,
Which was boundless,
Unconditional,
And subject to impromptu revocation.

It proclaimed twelve Eternal Rules
And promptly commanded their violation
In Its name and for Its glory.

It finally shambled off into the sky
Shouting at us to keep our eyes
Cast firmly upon the ground
As a reminder of our lowly state.

We indulged it for a week
Before we took it apart.

Off-site Essay: The Power of the Ring

This who have been reading this site may have deduce a particular fact about the author of the site:

1. The author is an unabashed geek
   
2. The author is fascinated by religion
   

In addition to this, anyone reading for any stretch of time will have realized that the author is an atheist. Unfortunately, this second realization may have prompted you to jump to any number of conclusions which are, in all liklihood, erroneous.

One thing that people instantly assume upon discovering my atheism is that I must, by definition, have an inherant hostility towards religion. To be sure, there are a number of things about religion that I can't agree with (most particularly the theistic conjecture that is central to a majority of religious beliefs) and there is a lot that I find objectionable in particular religions. Never the less, I actually do not have an inherit hositility towards religion, on the whole, and, in fact, consider it a valuable (if distorted) mirror of the human psyche.

Given this, my choice for this week's off-site essay nicely combines my geekiness as well as my fascination with religious subjects. It's a sermon by a Unitarian Universalist preacher. The topic of the sermon is The Lord of the Rings.

The semon is in PDF format so you will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed to read it.

Off-site Essay: Personal Values

I have not, on the whole, been a been fan of Wicca.

This is not because I disagree with its ontology, per say... I believe that Wicca is no more or less valid than any other religion out there (and if that sounds coy, I remind you that I'm an atheist &mdash do the math), nor is it because I have any moral objection to Wicca. I am certainly not concerned with the whole "witchcraft" angle, nor am I particularly concerned with the fact that Wicca has a rather dubious historical basis (again, something that I don't think distinguishes it from the majority of other religions in the world).

The biggest issue I have with Wicca has been the Wiccans. To be specific, I find that a lot of Wiccans strike me as being religious dilettantes. While I find nothing wrong with Wicca's core ideologies (other than the fact that they are a bit hard to pin down), I find that a lot of Wiccans seem to have joined the religion for the simple reason that Wicca has a very flexible belief structure. That alone isn't necessarily a bad thing. Buddhism, which I rather do admire, also has a fairly flexible range of potential beliefs that a given adherent can accept; however, where I find that most Buddhists approach that flexibility seriously and consider it an imperative to conscientiously work out their philosophy of the world, I find that many Wiccans seem to treat their religions flexibility as a lax fill-in-the-blanks theology that they can tailor to their personal convenience.

Fortunately, there are exceptions. I do respect those Wiccans that really take the time to think through their moral and philosophical stances. I am disappointed that they seem to be the exception.

Today's link is from the Existential Harmonics site which is run by one Kyle Lewis, who is also a friend of mine in real life. Kyle is definitely an extraordinary Wiccan and an extraordinary person. Recently he took the time to write down his personal values, framed by his Wiccan theology (as well as his studies of Kabbalah), in a systematic set of essays. He hasn't quite finished (ultimately he's going to have 10 + 1 categories); however, what he's done so far deserves reading. The link is to his introduction which he's thoughtfully cross-linked with the individual essays (currently through essay nine).

If you want to see a well developed set of moral considerations from a religious perspective that most people would find alien, exotic and, perhaps, threatening, I would implore you to take a look at what he's written.

On the Persistence of Religion, part VI

This is the sixth, and final, part of a multi-part essay on the persistence of religion.

In the first installment of the essay, I raised the question of the persistence of religion in individuals and sought to demonstrate that this persistence was not, as many unbelievers would like to think, genuinely akin to belief in such entities as Santa Clause. I explored a number of possibilities to account for the difference, without reaching any conclusions, and ended by suggesting that in order to explain the individual persistence of religion, we may need to consider its cultural persistence.

In the second installment I noted that religion was one of a small number of true human universals that transcends times and cultures. I also introduced and examined the hypothesis that the reason for this may be that religious beliefs persist because most humans have some sort of sense that the brain interprets as evidence of (for lack of a better word) a spiritual reality.

In the third installment I addressed a potential a priori objection to natural explanations for the persistence of religion in the form of the existence of atheists. I noted that polymorphistic features in biological organisms are permitted although they do require additional layers of explanation. I then proceeded to introduce the conjecture that religion may have adaptive value even if we don't posit that it is an adaptation whose function is to directly perceive some other sort of reality. I called this the Weak Adaptive Hypothesis and provided a few potential adaptive scenarios.

In the forth installment I introduced two new conjectures. The first conjecture was that religion may be a "spandrel", which is a non-adaptive biological feature that is the result of other adaptive features. The second conjecture, and the first one to more outside the realm of biology, was that religion may be have functional value for societies and that, as a consequence of this, those societies that successfully promote religious belief in their populations would be more stable than those societies that failed to do so. I called this the Social Preservation Hypothesis.

In the fifth installment I discussed the general theory of memetics, which states that ideas are replicators that evolve via the same processes of natural selection that biological organisms are subject to. I then introduced the hypothesis that religion can be best understood as competing meme-complexes which have adapted themselves to human being and which have evolved to overcome potential threats from counter-memes (e.g., the secular philosophies of The Enlightenment). This idea may be called The Memetic Hypothesis

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At last we are ready to bring our hypotheses back together, all in one place, so that we may give them final consideration:

• The Strong Adaptive Hypothesis: Religious beliefs persist because most humans have some sort of sense that the brain interprets as evidence of a "spiritual reality".


• The Weak Adaptive Hypothesis: Religious beliefs persist because they provide some function which directly promotes reproductive fitness among those who embrace religious beliefs.


• The Spandrel Hypothesis: Religious beliefs persist because they are the indirect result of some other biological feature or features which directly promote reproductive fitness among those who have said features; however, the capacity for religion and predisposition towards religion is not, itself, reproductively advantageous.


• The Social Preservation Hypothesis: Religion positively enhances the stability of those societies that embrace it. Consequently, those societies that fail to instill religious beliefs in a majority of their populations will have a tendency to collapse leaving behind only those societies which do instill such beliefs.


• The Memetic Hypothesis: Religion persists because religious ideas are memes. Once religious memes arise in the human population, selective pressures will favor those religious memes and meme-complexes that are better at propagating themselves against rival ideas and other cognitive obstacles.

Some may have noticed that there is one prominent hypothesis that I have not put into consideration. This hypothesis might be called, simply, The Theistic Hypothesis. The Theistic Hypothesis is that religion persists for the simple reason that it is the will of the Divine that it persists.

The central problem with The Theistic Hypothesis, for the purpose of this essay, is that such a hypothesis is good at accounting for the persistence of a particular religion but not for religion as a whole. We might, for instance, assume that Judaism has survived its thousands of years of existence because the Jews are the chosen people of the god of the Israelites. Such a hypothesis may well suffice for this particular instance, but presuming that YHWH exists and favors the Jews does nothing to explain the existence and persistence of Buddhism, or any of the other myriads of religions that do and have existed throughout human history. The Theistic Hypothesis is, in other words, not strong enough to answer the question that I am posing.

It is possible to strengthen the theistic hypothesis by adding an additional hypothesis. One might, for instance, posit an Infernal Hypothesis. The Infernal Hypothesis might be that the one true religion persists because of divine favor while all the false religions of the world persist because some powerful, malevolent agency (e.g., Satan) has duped the other members of the human race into false beliefs. A less sinister alternative to The Infernal Hypothesis might be The Faulty Receiver Hypothesis. In this hypothesis, the divine is trying to communicate to us true beliefs but, for whatever reason, most people (remember, all religions are in the minority) manage to misinterpret the message, leading to the flourishing of false beliefs.

And so forth.

I will not be including The Theistic Hypothesis, with or without supplementation, for two reasons. The first is that whenever a hypothesis requires additional hypotheses in order to account for a phenomenon, the general rule of thumb is to consider it to be less favored than hypotheses that don't require ad hoc supplementation. Many people believe that the Copernican model of a heliocentric universe supplanted the Ptolemaic model of an Earth centered universe on the weight of evidence. By the point that Copernicanism supplanted Ptolemaicism, however, there was no conclusive evidence that Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong. The reason that the Ptolemaic model fell out of favor is that it required the addition of too many epicycles.

You see, the motion of the planets across the sky isn't entire simple. Some planets will occasionally appear to actually be going backwards, or retrograde, in their movements, tracing out little loops in the sky. In the Copernican model, this is just an illusion caused by the fact that the Earth, too, is moving. In a geocentric model, however, those little loops are more of a challenge. Now, the ancients weren't stupid (a common error that we moderns often make). They recognized the problem and tried to account for it. The geocentric solution was to imagine that the planets were, in fact, doing just what they appeared to be doing… tracing out loops. They were imagined to have orbits within orbits (this was all incorporated into the notion that the planets were embedded within giant crystalline spheres, but let's not get distracted). Those sub-orbits were called epicycles.

As hypotheses went, supposing that a given planet had an orbit (a cycle) and a sub-orbit (an epicycle) isn't so outlandish — in the real solar-system, that's a very near description of how planetary moons move in respect to the sun. Unfortunately, it wasn't sufficient to propose a single epicycle for a given planet. The observed motions kept deviating from the predictions. This required more and more epicycles to be introduced. Even this wasn't enough to favor the Copernican model for the simple reason that the Copernican model also deviated from observation. This was because the Copernican model was wrong in supposing that planets traced perfectly circular orbits around the sun. However, once Kepler came along and described the correct motions via his Three Laws of Planetary Motion (you've got to love a theory with such a plain description), the modified Copernican model worked just fine. Meanwhile, the Ptolemaic model kept having to suppose more and more epicycles. As such, the Copernican hypothesis became favored on the basis of parsimony.

Parsimony is a ten dollar word used by epistemologists (a fifty dollary word meaning people who study knowledge) that means that there is an economy of explanation (huh? – bear with me). You may have heard of Occam's Razor which states that one should not necessarily multiply entities when seeking an explanation. Occam's Razor is an epistemological rule of thumb. What the rule is essentially saying (and let me warn you that the Razor is very easy to misunderstand) is that when two explanations can both account for a given phenomenon, it's generally a better idea to favor the one that requires you to make the least number of assumptions. It's not an iron-clad rule of nature but, in practice, it's a pretty good tool for clearing away philosophical deadwood.

The Theistic Hypothesis, when applied to the question of the persistence of religion, isn't able to stand on its own. It needs additional hypotheses – philosophical epicycles. The other hypotheses we've been considering don't. As such, the Theistic Hypothesis lacks parsimony.

The other reason I'm not including it is more basic. The Theistic Explanation is not evidential. It's central premise — there exists a god that desires some religion to persist — and it's supporting premises — most of us are being confounded by a malevolent agent or that we are misinterpreting the word of this god — rely upon a foundation of faith. It may seem ironic that I'm counting faith as a strike against it when the topic of consideration is, after all, about the persistence of a phenomenon that is deeply associated with Faith (with a big F). Although it may seem ironic, my goal isn't to evaluate the reality of anyone's particular beliefs. I am examining something that is indisputably real. Real people in the real world are, in fact, really religious. Even though I, in my personal life, explicitly believe that there are no gods (yes, I'm that sort of atheist… but we'll save that essay for another day) I can still consider the phenomenon and practice of religion because religion is more than it's individual manifestations. It's part of the human zeitgeist and has been for a very long time… hence the reason I'd like to understand it.

If The Theistic Hypothesis and it epicyclic supports work for you, then good for you. Since it is a faith-based hypothesis, I know that there's nothing I could do to make you even consider that it might be wrong, so there's no point in trying. I hope you enjoyed the essay and I sincerely hope that you will come back for future essays on different topics. If, however, you are willing to consider the alternatives, please read on.

So we now come to the point where I tell you which of our five hypotheses I'm advocating. I'm sorry to report that I have a confession. The truth of the matter is that my goal has not been to advocate any these hypotheses.

My real goal has been to, first of all, convince you that there is a question that is worth considering. We atheists are the worst when it comes to this. By and large, we don't like religion. I'm not the pure exception to the rule. I don't think as badly of religion as a lot of my co-areligionists, but I'll freely admit that there's a lot about religion that I honestly don't like (and which I'm not going to go into… this time). This tendency to think badly of religion all too often turns into a disdain for those who are religious. Again and again, I hear my fellow atheists say that religion is infantile and that the only reason it doesn't go away is that people are so damned gullible. I've said as much myself on too many occasions. The problem is that it's an easy assertion that I don't believe holds much water. Whatever reason there is for religion being persistent and ubiquitous, I do not think that we are justified in simply trying to wave it away in this fashion.

The other thing I've hoped to accomplish has been to demonstrate that there are multiple possibilities. Too many people who have considered this question have latched on to one particular explanation and have decided that the other possibilities don't even need consideration. This is just as bad, just as narrow-minded, and just as unjustified as dismissing religion as nothing more than Santa Claus for adults. It is precisely because the topic is worth considering that it's worth considering properly. That means that we can't just leap to the first conclusion that crosses our mind and it means that we can't settle on an answer unless we have strong and compelling reasons to believe that it is the right answer. Whether you favor memes, an ndiscovered sense, or some hypothesis that I haven't considered, the burden is on the hypothesis and its proponents (and that includes you!) to demonstrate that it is the best way to account for the phenomenon. Hypotheses are never justified on the basis that they "sound right".

Now that I've laid my cards on the table, I'm going to have to admit that it would be pretty crappy for me not to offer my personal speculations. I'm willing to do so but I want to be clear that I am not saying that my own inclinations and hunches are, in any respect, to be treated as definitive or authoritative. Indeed, I want to take a moment to say that the list I've provided isn't, itself, intended to be either inclusive or mutually exclusive. By that, I mean that it is entirely plausible that the real explanation will turn out to be another hypothesis altogether or that the real solution may incorporate several of the hypotheses that I've laid out (with or without additional hypotheses). The reason I've laid out these particular five is that a) I've encountered them or their variants frequently enough to convince me that they are being given due consideration by serious investigators and b) because I think that any of them are sufficiently plausible that they could, in principle, be right. Never the less, I hope that you will only think of them as a sample of the alternatives and as a catalyst for your own speculations. Don't limit yourself to my considerations.

Okay, enough caveats already. Let my speculations begin. I'll start by giving my personal impressions of each hypothesis:

What I like about The Strong Adaptive Hypothesis is that it is both simple and direct. There isn't a whiff of epicycle here nor is there anything inherently outlandish is supposing that, if humans are perceiving something, there's something to be perceived. The old aphorism about smoke and the presence of fire isn't entirely reliable but it's not a bad rule of thumb. The fact that it does make a specific claim, however, means that it's assuming a very specific burden: advocates of the SAH are going to need to demonstrate that we have an organ that perceives a religious reality.

This isn't far different from the challenge that Noam Chomsky had when he was advancing his hypothesis that humans have a language organ. At the time, the main competing hypothesis was that humans learned language by a process called operant conditioning. Frankly, if I had lived back then, I would have probably thought that Chomsky didn't have a chance. History would have proved me wrong. Chomsky did a brilliant job of demolishing the operant conditioning hypothesis and of supporting his contention that humans do, in fact, have an innate grammar.

If there is something to the SAH, I think that Chomsky's methodology could provide a clue or two on how to go about proving the case. If.

Personally, I'm doubtful. The basic unreliability of religious experience makes me think that the hypothesis has some serious hurdles to overcome. Even supposing that we have an underdeveloped organ doesn't really, in my opinion, answer the question of the immense variation in religious beliefs (which is especially clear if we include historical beliefs, which we must). Here's why.

I'm nearsighted — very nearsighted. Without corrective lenses, I would be effectively blind. The big E on a standard eye chart is a blur, for me. In spite of the abysmal quality of my vision, though, my descriptions of what I see are consistent with the descriptions that another similarly impaired person would provide. Granted, those descriptions are going to be along the lines of "there's a large, vertically thin red blur next to a squat green blur", but the content of the descriptions will be largely isomorphic – we'd be describing blurs, but we'd be describing the same kinds of blurs.

I don't see that being the case with religious beliefs. Even people who share religious traditions can have wildly different visions of their religions. That's why stamping out heresy is such a major activity for established religions. It's too easy for people to "see" different things when it comes to religions. If the SAH is going to work, it will be necessary for it to account for that fact. I haven't seen any propositions that do so that don't, ultimately, end up introducing epicycles into the hypothesis.

There was a time, not to long ago, when I would have been similarly doubtful of the robustness of The Weak Adaptive hypothesis. Once again, it's a hypothesis where the burden is upon its proponents to demonstrate that there is something positively adaptive about religion. That's a tall order since some of the most spectacular manifestations of religion are clearly maladaptive. Forget about suicide bombing, for a moment, and consider celibacy. From an evolutionary perspective, celibacy is as good as suicide. If you don't pass your genes on to the next generation, you're nothing more than a genetic graveyard.

Given the obvious maladaptivity of religion, it was hard for me to think of an adaptive benefit that could offset its reproductive deficit. To be sure, there were any number of propositions. Most of them struck me as being just-so stories, like the idea that religion makes you do better in battle and, thus, helps you find mates. It's a good story but it doesn't have much of an empirical basis.

The recent research into religion and stress has made me a bit less confident. Stress is a real phenomenon that has been well documented to have a serious impact on both the mental and physical health of those it effects. Anything that serves to reduce stress would have a tremendous amount of reproductive worth. Perhaps enough to overcome a few deficits.

I am not yet convinced that this is sufficient to account for the persistence of religion. The reason I'm hedging is that religion is not the only way to reduce stress. You can reduce it with breathing and stretching exercises (e.g., yoga), by embracing positive affirmations, by engaging in acts of creative visualization, by indulging in certain form of recreational pharmacology, and so on. Given that there are so many avenues to stress reduction, it seems odd that natural selection would favor an avenue that comes with a reproductive deficit.

What I suspect to be the case is that humans have evolved neurological systems that help us to manage stress and that there are multiple ways for those systems to be engaged. Religion is one such method but not necessarily a built in one. More on this later.

Spandrels are, flat out, a cool idea. The Spandrel Hypothesis neatly avoids the problem of finding a direct reproductive advantage to religion while also sparing us the difficulty of justifying religion's social value. If the hypothesis is correct, religion is just a biological artifact: an artifact that is sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, sometimes inspiring, and sometimes banal, but an artifact all the same. It persists because it is part of us but not an essential element of our being. There's nothing wrong about being religious but there's also nothing wrong about not being religious. Can I get a kum ba yah?

The big problem I have with spandrels is that no one has ever done a satisfactory job of demonstrating their existence, nor do I just mean that in the context of an account for religion. No one has found an unambiguous example of a spandrel is any biological feature. If you look through the literature, the best candidates are things like bipedalism in lizards— forget about complex behaviors! Until spandrels are set on a firmer foundation, I'm just not comfortable backing that particular horse.

The Social Preservation Hypothesis kind of scares me. It's an awfully short distance from concluding that religion is good for societies to concluding that atheism is bad for societies. That leads directly to the views that atheists are bad for society. We all know what happens next. If you don't, do yourself a favor and go see Hotel Rwanda. That said, the worth of a hypothesis can not be tied to its potential social impact. Even if I could demonstrate that the SPH would lead directly to me and my fellows being led into a gas chamber, it would be wrong to say that this invalidates the hypothesis.

Fortunately for me, I think that the proposition has other issues not least being the fact that the last two hundred years have provided some very compelling demonstrations that secular nations can do at least as well, if not better, than theocratic nations. The Enlightenment didn't survive the 18th century but the Enlightenment principle that government should be disentangled from religion has been a cornerstone of modern democracy in the Western world (as well as quite a few spots in the Eastern world, thank you very much). While it is true that most secular democracies have largely religious populations, it must be remembered that the SPH includes the proposition that religion is preserved by top-down social forces. Religion is good for society, therefore society promotes religion (if it wants to remain viable, at least). In secular democracies, religion doesn't get state support, so one of the pillars of the SPH ends up being weakened.

Of course, the SPH can, itself, be preserved by broadening our definition of society. I think that we can all agree that a society is more than its government (only pausing to note, with some smugness, that, this, too, is an Enlightenment conviction). Perhaps, in countries such as the United States, society as a whole does the job of promoting religion and, therefore, social stability with or without its government's assistance.

Maybe so; however, if the SPH were true, wouldn't we expect to find that societies that works with their governments to promote religion (i.e., theocracies) were more stable than societies that did not receive official assistance? Would we also not expect to find that secular societies would, over time, become less religious since there was less support for religion from official institutions – an speculation belied by the resent rise of fundamentalism in the United States?

The SPH isn't dead (otherwise I wouldn't have included it), but I think that it clearly needs work and I have a strong suspicion that the only way to make it work is to take a trip into epicycle land.

Then there is The Memetic Hypothesis.

My own personal perspective is that memetics has a lot of potential. It is, however, important to note that memetics is not yet a science. In fact, it's important to shout it.

MEMETICS IS NOT A SCIENCE!!!

The reason that I need to shout it is that a lot of memetic enthusiasts treat it as being something that is absolutely established as fact. The "meme" meme has proved to be very successful at convincing people that it's a valid idea. Among other things, it has quite a bit of intuitive appeal. So did the geocentric model of the solar system.

I won't go so far as to say that memes are pseudoscience. Dawkins actually did do a very good job, in The Selfish Gene, of defending the logical existence of replicators. If the replicator hypothesis works for genes, and I think it does, there's no clear reason to reject its application to the idea of ideas, which is to say memes. The problem isn't that memes are inherently implausible – quite the contrary – the problem is that there hasn't been much progress is formalizing the study of memes. Until that happens, it ain't a science.

Because it isn't a science and because it hasn't been studied methodically (or, more importantly, methodologically) it's all too easy for people to come up with overblown speculations about memes and the role they play in human culture.

Since this section of the essay is all about my own opinions, I'll come right out and say that I am a meme guy. I would be very surprised if memetics wasn't a science a hundred years from now. I certainly believe that memes offer us the best possible hope of accounting for elements of human nature that other theories haven't been able to (or able to do well). That said, there's a lot of crap that floats to the surface when people start trying to explain things in terms of memes.

I believe that the biggest sin that's perpetuated by the memetics crowd is that memes are used to account for every last bit of human behavior and culture. Some very respectable and intelligent people have, essentially, claimed that everything that makes a person a person is their store of memes. We are, in other words, nothing but big meme buckets.

I don't buy it. I think that humans have innate characteristics that can not be accounted for by a pure theory of memes. I think that those innate characteristics include the presence of a number of features that act as memetic filters and biasing agents. I think that any theory that requires us to be treated as passive meme repositories will almost certainly be incomplete.

That said, I think that meme-theory does offer us a lot of explanatory power when it comes to explaining the persistence of religion, but I think that it needs a little help.

Let's go back to the supposition that we have evolved stress reduction mechanisms. From a meme's-eye view of the world, anything that can help you get past the critical filters that might otherwise cause an individual to reject you is something that can be used as a lever. Of course, I'm speaking metaphorically. Meme's don't actually have desires or goals. This is just a short way of saying that given a selective environment, those memes better adapted to overcoming reproductive obstacles will prosper. It's Evolutionary Theory 101.

Supposing that humans do have an evolved system that supports stress reduction, any memes that did a good job of stimulating that system would have an advantage when it came to bonding with other human beings. Now once those memes start spreading through the environment, things get interesting.

Biologists have a term to describe two or more organisms evolving in tandem. The word is coevolution. You often find cases of coevolution when organisms have a hospiïtic relationship with one another (see part V). Bees and flowers are excellent examples of this. Bees have, obviously, evolved to be efficient collectors of pollen. Flowers, however, benefit from bees carrying pollen so they, in turn, have evolved to make it easier for bees to pollinate them. The two types of being, from entirely different kingdoms, have, unconsciously, shaped one another. Similar examples abound.

Let us suppose that some religious memes had the effect of helping humans reduce stress and that some of these memes had the necessary features that allowed them to get past at least some people's selective memetic filters. Any humans that bonded with those memes would have a reproductive advantage over those that didn't (at least in this one domain). Let us further suppose that there existed genetic variations in the human population such that some people would have an easier time being "infected" by such memes. Since those people would tend to be better at spreading their genes (not memes!) than their fellows, the genetic "susceptibility" to religion would tend to spread. In other words, religious memes would get better at spreading themselves and humans would get better at receiving them.

Its important to remember that both the memes and the genes in this scenario are still "selfish". Any religious memes that could spread themselves without offering benefits to their hosts ("kill anyone that doesn't believe in Grall!") would do so, and any genes that were amenable to non-religious stress reduction (e.g., via yoga) would too.

One consequence of this is that, in addition to coevolution between religious memes and people, there would also be arms races between adverse memes and people with a genetic resistance to them. In some environments it might be better to be religiously receptive while, in others, it might be better to be religiously resistant ("I'm not going to kill my cows in order to revive the dead, thank you very much!"). Remember when I talked about polymorphism and how polymorphisms needed to be explained. Well, here was have a way to account not only for the existence and persistence of religion but also for the existence and persistence of atheism. We've come full circle!

Do I believe that this is the reality of the matter? Well… maybe. Then again, maybe not. This is, of course, just one possible account. Honestly, it's a stab in the dark and I would not be at all disappointed (although I would be a bit surprised) if the truth had absolutely nothing to do with memes and genes. Like I said, my goal isn't to convince you that my own pet theory is the right one. I'm hoping that I've stimulated your own thoughts on the subject.

I also hope you've enjoyed this little exploration. I think that the subject of religion is an exciting one and one that absolutely does deserve to be explored. Right now, there are a lot of very intelligent and creative individuals doing just that and I hope that my own efforts to hack my way through the underbrush haven't done an injustice to their labors. I would like to thank you for sticking with me through this. I know that the path has been more than a bit dense and I wouldn't be surprised if I haven't lost more than a few of your in the encroaching verbiage. I appreciate your own persistence in reading this essay.

Next week, I'll have something a bit lighter for you to snack on. Take care.

On the Persistence of Religion part V

This is the fifth part of a multi-part essay on the persistence of religion.

In the first installment of the essay, I raised the question of the persistence of religion in individuals and sought to demonstrate that this persistence was not, as many unbelievers would like to think, genuinely akin to belief in such entities as Santa Clause. I explored a number of possibilities to account for the difference, without reaching any conclusions, and ended by suggesting that in order to explain the individual persistence of religion, we may need to consider its cultural persistence.

In the second installment I noted that religion was one of a small number of true human universals that transcends times and cultures. I also introduced and examined the hypothesis that the reason for this may be that religious beliefs persist because most humans have some sort of sense that the brain interprets as evidence of (for lack of a better word) a spiritual reality.

In the third installment I addressed a potential a priori objection to natural explanations for the persistence of religion in the form of the existence of atheists. I noted that polymorphistic features in biological organisms are permitted although they do require additional layers of explanation. I then proceeded to introduce the conjecture that religion may have adaptive value even if we don't posit that it is an adaptation whose function is to directly perceive some other sort of reality. I called this the Weak Adaptive Hypothesis and provided a few potential adaptive scenarios.

In the forth installment I introduced two new conjectures. The first conjecture was that religion may be a "spandrel", which is a non-adaptive biological feature that is the result of other adaptive features. The second conjecture, and the first one to more outside the realm of biology, was that religion may be have functional value for societies and that, as a consequence of this, those societies that successfully promote religious belief in their populations would be more stable than those societies that failed to do so. I called this the Social Preservation Hypothesis.

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Just as the Social Preservation Hypothesis sought to describe the persistence of religion in terms of non-biological factors, so will my next, and final, hypothesis. In order to understand this hypothesis, however, it will be necessary to introduce the concept of memes. In order to understand memes, however, I will need to ask you to indulge me in a few digressions. This is going to take awhile, so please be patient.

In 1976, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins published a book called The Selfish Gene. The book was almost immediately the source of immense controversy and is the principle reason that Dawkins has become simultaneously famous as well as notorious.

Much of the book's controversy has come from misunderstandings stemming from the title and the central notion of a selfish gene. Many people have erroneously concluded that the book advocates a view that either genes have emotional states (i.e., selfishness) or that because our genes are "programmed" for selfishness then we, too, should behave selfishly. Neither stance represents Dawkins position and he has gone to great lengths to make that plain.

The book's actual goal is to suggest that evolution can best be understood by taking a "gene's eye" perspective. The common view, before Dawkins, was to assume that evolution acted for the good of the species.¹ One can still find nature documentaries that suggest that individuals will sometimes sacrifice themselves for the good of the species. Dawkins demonstrates that genuinely self-sacrificial behaviors would be selected against by natural selection since those animals that lacked such self-sacrificing traits would prosper at the expense of their altruistic comrades.

The central thesis of The Selfish Gene is that natural selection does not act upon species, as a whole (a notion called group selection), nor even individuals. Instead, natural selection operates at the level of genes. The reason for this, Dawkin's argues, is that genes are the only things that persist from generation to generation. While an individual animal may have a lifetime that's measured in decades (and some trees in millennia) genes can persist for millions or even billions of years.² From the "perspective" of a gene, individual organisms are temporary receptacles whose primary function is to ensure that its genes make it to the next generation.

It is because natural selection favors genes that are good at making it into the next generation that genuinely altruistic behaviors are selected again, hence the concept of "selfishness". The genes are not, themselves, selfish (or, in any sense, aware at all) but those genes that promote "selfish" behaviors are the ones that tend to do best when it comes to the critical task of being reproduced. Now, that said, the focus of this essay is not to defend the selfish gene hypothesis (read the book if you want the best possible argument for the hypothesis); however, it is important to offer one clarification. Although the hypothesis forbids the evolution of genuinely self-sacrificial behavior, it does allow for the development of a type of altruism known as reciprocal altruism.

Reciprocal altruism is a type of behavior where an animal will act in the interests of another animal in exchange for similar acts in kind towards itself. So, let us say that I am a member of a troop of monkeys and we are foraging for food. I happen to get more food than I strictly need while another monkey in the troop gets less than he needs. In the strictest sense, it would be to my advantage to eat all the food I got and to save up extra calories against future want; however, if I give the disadvantaged monkey my extra shares, I'll be at a net advantage if he does the same thing for me when our circumstances are reversed. This works even better if the tribe, as a whole, does this as a matter of course.

Of course this only works if the other monkeys would actually reciprocate, which means that there must be ways of identifying and punishing cheaters who try to take advantage of the system without putting anything back into it. This is a relatively high bar to cross and the reason that reciprocal altruism is the exception and not the rule in the natural world; however, game theorists have constructed models that demonstrate that such systems can naturally evolve. One of the critical components is the ability to remember whether or not your conspecifics actually do hold up their end of the bargain.

It should also be noted that Dawkins specifically exempts humans from being slaves to our instincts. He rather boldly proclaims that we, alone among the animals, have the ability to rebel against our selfish genes.

In Dawkins conception of how natural selection works, the fundamental unit of natural selection is something called a replicator. In the most basis sense, a replicator is something that makes copies of itself. There is more too it, though. Dawkins uses the example of fire as something that copies itself while, never the less, failing to be a replicator. In order for something to legitimately qualify as a replicator it needs a few critical ingredients.

The first ingredient is fidelity. Heredity is the property whereby a copy is significantly (as opposed to trivially) similar to its "parent". To use the example of fire, a small fire can produce a big fire (or vice versa), a greenish blaze can produce a yellowish blaze, and so forth. In short, one type of fire can lead to a wholly different kind and there is no "essence of this fire" that gets transmitted between fiery "generations". Heredity requires that replicators are not only good at making copies of themselves, but that those copies are, more often than not, faithful. Low fidelity obliviates heredity.

Fecundity is a nice term that refers to the rate of copying that a replicator undergoes. Even the most benign environment contains dangerous. A replicator that isn't good at making copies of itself faster than those copies get destroyed by its environment can not succeed.

Longevity, as you might well guess, is a description of how long a given instance of a replicator is able to keep making copies of itself before it expires. A replicator that doesn't tend to survive long enough to make at least one copy of itself is, of course, doomed.

Finally, we have variation. Variation simply means that it's possible that any given link in a chain of replicators will be different from its "parent". As you might well guess, this is essentially the idea of mutation. Variation may seem at odds with fidelity, but perfect fidelity does not allow for evolution. By itself, variation doesn't do anything for natural selection. When you couple it with the other elements of heredity, though, you have everything you need in order for natural selection to do its work. This is especially true when replicators are competing for limited resources that they need in order to manufacture more copies of themselves. In that circumstance, variation leads to competition which, in turn, creates selective criteria that favor those replicators that do the best job of out competing their rivals.

In the biological world, genes are replicators. Individuals are not and neither are species. At this point you might well wonder why we need the term replicator when we already have the concept of genes which precisely fulfill the role. Dawkin's provided the answer to that in the very last chapter (of the original edition) by noting that even though genes are the dominant replicators on this planet, there is no reason to suppose that replicators need to be genes, so long as they fulfill all of the necessary requirements. In order to illustrate this, he suggested that a new type of replicator has recently arisen on this world: the meme.

A meme is, more or less, a small bit of information.³ Examples of memes are jingles, political slogans, recipes, chain letters, and simple superstitions (e.g., you should throw spilled salt over your shoulder). What makes memes special is that they are replicators. They have the necessary components of heredity and variation. Instead of replicating inside the mechanisms of the cell, however, memes replicate within the cognitive machinery of the human brain and spread themselves from mind to mind by way of imitation.

You may find it difficult to afford memes the same sort of reality that we give to genes. Genes, after all, are physical entities. One can pry apart genes with chemical tools and examine them using a variety of techniques, but memes seem to be rather abstract by comparison. However, before we draw to sharp of a distinction, genes, in reality, are ultimately nothing more than information encoded in nucleotides. Cells take that information and convert it into proteins that are, ultimately, used to create more cells (and, ultimately, whole organisms) but the fundamental nature of genes and DNA is abstract information. Indeed, genes are, quite literally, digital, which is one of the reasons that it has such a high degree of fidelity when it makes copies of itself. The main difference, as far as fundamental natures go, between memes and genes is that genes encode their information in nucleic acids whereas memes encode their information in human neurons.

The analogy between genes and memes goes deeper, too. Just as genes can work in concert to create more complex structures, so can memes. When genes do it, we call the result DNA, which is a long sequence of genes that are bound together. When memes become grouped, we call the result a meme-complex.⁴ An example of a meme might be the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (da-da-da-dum!) whereas all the Fifth Symphony, itself, is an example of a meme-complex. Some meme-complexes are so tightly bound together that they almost act like enormous memes (meaning that the whole thing tends to get replicated). Other meme-complexes are more loose with a given meme-complex having similar but divergent components from another meme-complex of the same type (just as two members of a given animal species will have similar but different DNA). As an example of this, if we were to thoroughly examine the socialist meme complexes in two individuals who have embraced socialist doctrines, we would find a lot of the same "socialist" memes, but also differences.

Accepting, for the sake of argument, that memes are real, what's so important about them? Just as genes invert our view of the way biology works, memes invert our understanding of human cultures. Memes, like genes, are in competition for a limited resource. That resource is brain space. Because they are in competition, mimetic evolution favors memes that are "selfish", meaning that those memes that do a better job of getting themselves into human brains and which do a better job of spreading themselves to other brains will be favored by natural selection. It also means that the ideas that memes encapsulate don't have any necessary benefit for the people who hold them. It is important to fully understand the implications of this, so I'm going to spend a little time exploring what this means.

Traditionally, we tend to think of ideas as being for benefit of the people who hold them. From a meme's-eye view, though, people are only vehicles that are used for the propagation of more memes. Some (including Dawkins) have, in fact, compared memes to viruses. Viruses use the machinery of cells to propagate themselves and memes use the machinery of the brain to do likewise. It is a tempting comparison, but one that I think we need to be wary of. The reason I advise caution is that viruses are almost wholly parasitic whereas the relationship between memes and meme-hosts (i.e., people) is generally more complex.

In the natural world, a parasite is an organism that utilizes a host organism in order to further its own survival. The relationship that a parasite has with its host is detrimental to the host. A symbiote, by contrast, may also exist within another organism. The difference is that the relationship between a symbiote and its host is mutually beneficial. An example of a parasite is a tapeworm, which eats the food that passes through its hosts intestines without providing anything in return. Tapeworms are parasites. By contrast, there are intestinal microorganisms that are not only harmless but necessary for digestion. Such animals are symbiotes. It must be stressed that symbiotic organisms are still being selfish. In this case, it is in their self-interest to work with their hosts for their mutual benefit. This is a special case of the sort of reciprocal altruism that I discussed previously.

We tend to think of parasites and symbiotes as being entirely different and, indeed, opposite of one another. In the real world, however, there is a spectrum of entities with parasite and symbiote simply being two poles on a continuum. To my knowledge, there is no single term which neutrally describes animals that exist in this continuum, so I would like to suggest that we call them hospiotes (hoss-'pE-Ots), from the Latin word for guest. Just as one can have welcome and unwelcome guests, a hospiote may be beneficial or detrimental to its host. Memes should be viewed as hospiïtic (hos-'pE-i-tic) organisms.

A given meme (i.e., idea) doesn't have to be good for a given person that it bonds with (again, I prefer "bond" as a neutral term to be preferred to the term "infect", which carries pejorative connotations). An easy example of a bad meme is the idea of suicide bombing. Memes that encourage suicide bombing are clearly detrimental to the survival of those who carry them (or, more precisely, to the subset of those hosts who act on the idea), but they also clearly do manage to spread themselves – which brings us to the next point about memes.

Some meme theorists also tend to cast humans as being nothing more than passive carriers for memes. I believe that this is also a misrepresentation of the theory. Humans are sapient entities. We have the ability to consider the ideas that we believe in and reject them if we feel that they are harmful. As such there is a selective pressure for memes to evolve towards the symbiotic pole of the hospiïtic spectrum – a meme that encourages people to play in poison oak is going to have a much more difficult time spreading than a meme that helps its hosts avoid poison oak ("Leaves of three, let it be!") – however, detrimental memes can (and do) have means of spreading if they can get past the critical filters that otherwise cause us to reject unfavorable memes.

Consider memes that encourage smoking cigarettes. Smoking tobacco is clearly unhealthy and most people are aware of the health risks involved. A naïve reading of meme theory might lead us to suppose that any meme that encouraged smoking would be doomed because people would reject it. Obviously that doesn't happen in the real world. So how to these memes propagate themselves? One advantage that they have is that smoking is addictive. Once a person starts smoking, it's very hard from them to stop. A given meme, however, doesn't "care" whether or not a particular host acts upon it. It's "concern" is spreading new copies of itself to other individuals. This means that "smoking" memes need to bond with individuals who haven't already embraced the idea.

One such avenue is persuasive advertisements (an example of smoking memes working together with other memes as a meme-complex⁵) which help to convince people that smoking is socially beneficial. Another, more direct, method is peer pressure. Although these memes are clearly not beneficial to their hosts, they able to spread by convincing new hosts that some mitigating advantage to smoking that offsets the costs (e.g., "If I smoke, I'll be popular").⁶

Because memes are selfish replicators, the memes themselves have no intrinsic preference for where in the hospiote spectrum they find themselves. Because we try to select good ideas and reject bad ones, there is an overall trend for obviously good ideas to do better than obviously bad ideas when it comes to finding new hosts, but a harmful meme that can get around our cognitive filters can spread just as well as a helpful meme that utilizes a strategy of mutual beneficiality. Indeed, there are circumstances where such memes will spread more rapidly than their symbiotic competitors.⁷

At this point, we can cautiously bring religion into the discussion. Religions can be viewed as hospiïtic meme-complexes. I wish to note that I am taking pains to use neutral terminology. This is, unfortunately, an especial necessity given that many meme-theorists go out of their way to describe religion as a viral complex (indeed, Dawkins, who is definitely not friendly towards religion, titled his essay on religious memes Viruses of the Mind). I believe that neutral language is necessary for developing a proper memetic theory of religion. A given religion may well be disadvantages to a given host (like an encouragement to smoke), neutral (like a jingle) or beneficial (like a warning against poison ivy). In fact, the very same religious meme-complex may be beneficial towards one individual and detrimental towards another depending on how that given individual reacts to it.

The advantage of viewing religions as meme-complexes is that we are freed from the necessity of having to presume that religion needs to be a biological adaptation or that it needs to serve any necessarily positive role in human society. Memes exist to spread memes. What strategies they use to do so are only constrained by the set of strategies that would be successful for the task.

If we hypothesize that religions are meme complexes, we need only presume that, at some point in the distant past, some certain proto-religious memes developed. Perhaps these were some sort of crude belief in an afterlife or a belief that certain natural forces had personalities. Whatever the case may be, all that matters is that those early memes were at least moderately successful at spreading themselves. Once we have that, the fact that they are replicators means that they will evolve via the mechanisms of natural selection.

The critical thing is that those religious memes and (eventually) meme-complexes that were better at a) finding new hosts and b) preventing rival memes and meme-complexes from co-opting those same hosts would be selected for. Those memes that weren't able to compete died out. In the simplest possible terms, this means that religion, once started, wouldn't only continue to persist in human populations, but that religion, over time, would become a more and more powerful influence among humans as those religions that were better at finding and keeping believers would out-compete those that weren't.

One corollary to this can be found in observations of how bacteria evolve in the presence of anti-bacterial agents. When an anti-bacterial agent is initially introduced into a population of bacteria, the bacteria initially experience a die-off. However, any mutant bacteria that survive the initial onslaught will eventually repopulate the environment, passing their anti-bacterial resistance to their descendants. In meme-pools, the same effect can be predicted. An idea that might initial serve to inhibit certain strains of memes (say, Enlightenment-style skepticism towards traditional Christianity) may initially inhibit the population. Those memes that are resistant to the new inhibitor, however, will quickly replace the original meme-strains (as happened with post-Enlightenment Christianity). This means that we not only have a hypothesis that allows us to account for the persistence of religion in the past, but a positive prediction that religion will continue to persist throughout the foreseeable future.

One final advantage of viewing religions as meme-complexes is that different religions can use different strategies to spread themselves, so long as their strategies are successful enough to continue leveraging them into the future. As such, some religious meme-complexes may utilizes such strategies as evangelization while others may "prefer" a strategy of generational indoctrination and others, still, may tend towards individual mystical revelations (and so on). Given this, meme theory, while giving us a unified theory of religion does not require us to have a unified account of how religions persist. Each religion can be considered a distinct case, just as every species of animal represents a distinct solution to the problems of animal survival. Where our other hypotheses may imply that all religions are fundamentally alike (having a common adaptive or social function, for instance), meme theory allows for given religions to be fundamentally different from one another.

This, at long last, brings us to our bullet for The Memetic Hypothesis:

• Religion persists because religious ideas are memes. Once religious memes arise in the human population, selective pressures will favor those religious memes and meme-complexes that are better at propagating themselves against rival ideas and other cognitive obstacles.

This will conclude this next-to-last installment of the essay. In the next installment I will briefly consider one set of hypotheses that I will not be granting any bullets and will explain why I won't be doing so. I will then give final consideration to the hypotheses that we have explored. In doing so, I shall draw this essay to a conclusion.

There is, indeed, a light at the end of the tunnel. I'll see you next week.⁸

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¹ A similar, and equally implausible suggestion is that predators serve their prey species by weeding out the old and the sick. While that does tend to happen, it is not because lions (for instance) are being altruistic towards gazelles. The reason that the old and the sick tend to be the ones caught is simply because they are the easiest to catch. The proof that there is no inherent altruism in predation can be found in the simple observation that along with the old and the sick, predators also catch young animals in disproportionate numbers.

² The HOX gene complex in animals is an example of a genuinely persistent gene. All animals have HOX genes, which indicates that we inherited them from the common ancestor of all animal-kind, meaning that they extend back into the Precambrian.

³ Please note that I am not using bit in the formal sense of being a single unit of information that is either true or false.

⁴ The memes are not, of course, themselves socialists. They merely represent bits and pieces of socialist dogma.

⁵ Meme-complexes are also sometimes called memeplexes. Although the word memeplex is certainly catchy, I think that it's bit too cute for my taste, so I'll stick with the compound term.

⁶ People often get confused by the difference between memes and the physical expression of those memes. A gene-complex (i.e., DNA) is a coded set of information for creating an organism. The actual organism is the gene-complexe's physical expression in the world. A dog is not its DNA, nor is dog DNA a dog. A meme-complex is a set of ideas that can be spread between individuals. Such a complex may find expression of those ideas in the real world. The "Porsche" meme-complex is not an actual Porsche. A Porsche is not the Porsche meme-complex. The production of physical Porches, however, does aid the dissemination of the Porsche memes (just as dog bodies help spread dog genes).

⁷ One of the most striking examples of this happened to the Xhosa. The Xhosa were an African tribe suffering from the effects of European colonialism. In the mid-1800's a self-proclaimed prophetess told the other members of the tribe that she had received a revelation. Her revelation was that if the Xhosa killed their own cattle and stopped plowing their fields, the dead would come back to life and that the Europeans would be expelled from their lands. Because of the desperate circumstances of the Xhosa, this idea rapidly spread through the Xhosa population, resulting in a wholesale slaughter of cattle. Because of this, the Xhosa succumbed to famine and were forced to throw themselves on the mercies of the Europeans who separated and assimilated the survivors, effectively ending the existence of the Xhosa as an independent culture.

⁸ There is a lot more to meme-theory than I have been able to touch on. For a fuller exploration, I would suggest starting at the Wikipedia entry on memes. The Principia Cybernetica is another excellent starting point.

On the Persistence of Religion, part IV

This is the forth part of a multi-part essay on the persistence of religion.

In the first installment of the essay, I raised the question of the persistence of religion in individuals and sought to demonstrate that this persistence was not, as many unbelievers would like to think, genuinely akin to belief in such entities as Santa Clause. I explored a number of possibilities to account for the difference, without reaching any conclusions, and ended by suggesting that in order to explain the individual persistence of religion, we may need to consider its cultural persistence.

In the second installment I noted that religion was one of a small number of true human universals that transcends times and cultures. I also introduced and examined the hypothesis that the reason for this may be that religious beliefs persist because most humans have some sort of sense that the brain interprets as evidence of (for lack of a better word) a spiritual reality.

In the third installment I addressed a potential a priori objection to natural explanations for the persistence of religion in the form of the existence of atheists. I noted that polymorphistic features in biological organisms are permitted although they do require additional layers of explanation. I then proceeded to introduce the conjecture that religion may have adaptive value even if we don't posit that it is an adaptation whose function is to directly perceive some other sort of reality. I called this the Weak Adaptive Hypothesis and provided a few potential adaptive scenarios.

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At this point, both hypotheses on the table can be described as directly adaptive, which is to say that they postulate that we have evolved a predisposition to religion and that the reasons we have done so are because religious belief is either the result of a specific adaptive function (i.e., some sort of undiscovered sensory organ) or because belief in religion has positive survival value (e.g., by providing a means of reducing stress). The next hypothesis I would like to examine would best be described as an non-adaptive hypothesis that, never the less, depends on adaptive forces. In order to explain what that means and to illustrate the hypothesis, I first need to introduce the concept of spandrels.

In architecture, a spandrel is the space between a curved body (or bodies) and a boundary. The classical example of a spandrel is the roughly triangular space that exists when two arches are set side by side. One common feature of spandrels is that they tend to have a lot of ornamentation. Someone who was architecturally naïve might even go so far as to conclude that spandrels exist in order to provide nice little spaces for artwork and engraving when, in fact, they are only they as an unintended consequence: the by-products of other, necessary architectural elements.

In 1979 the biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin wrote a paper called "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme". In the paper, they used the metaphor of architectural spandrels to hypothesize that some features of biological organisms were not the result of direct biological adaptations but were, instead, the non-adaptive consequence of other traits. They suggested, appropriately enough, that such features (should they be proven to exist) ought to be called spandrels.

Gould and Lewontin, frankly, had an axe to grind when it came to adaptationism. They felt that the adaptationist paradigm had gone too far in seeking to describe every last feature of every last organism in terms of selective adaptations. As such, their use of the word spandrel was a deliberate attempt to use a word with absolutely no adaptationistic language what-so-ever; however, it must be noted that in order for biological spandrels to exist, there must be some adaptive interplay going on in other features of a given organism, which is why I indicated that I would be presenting a hypothesis that was non-adaptive but dependant upon adaptation.

A spandrel hypothesis for the persistence of religion would suggest that even though natural selection doesn't favor a predisposition towards religion in populace, there are other characteristics in humans which have the indirect consequence of resulting in such a predisposition. The advantage of such a hypothesis is that it is no longer necessary to presume that religion has any positive value in order for it to persist. In fact, religion can even represent a negative reproductive advantage so long as that disadvantage doesn't outweigh the selective advantages of whatever trait or traits are resulting the spandrel.

In the first installment of this essay, one of my readers¹ suggested that our tendency to be religious might be a result of a fundamental need for pack leader (i.e., an alpha) which we then project into a kind of ultimate alpha. Although I have certain issues with Ron's specific idea, this is a good example of a spandrel hypothesis.² If I were to restructure it in spandrel form, I would rewrite the hypothesis as, "It is postulated that there exists adaptive traits in humans such that we have a desire for an alpha and that we have also evolved a sense of imagination. It is further hypothesized that the intersection between our desire for an alpha and our imaginations results in a non-adaptive predisposition towards imagining the existence of an ultimate-alpha being (i.e., a god) and a predisposition to worship said imagined being."

Before I go ahead and put down The Spandrel Hypothesis as a bullet I feel that I must point out that the very idea of spandrels in biology is controversial. Many biologists either reject Gould and Lewontin's idea of spandrels outright or believe that they have overstated their case. In order to validate the hypothesis, it would be necessary to find an unequivocal example of biological feature that would require us to resort to the conclusion that the feature is a spandrel. Numerous possible cases for spandrels have been advanced but, to date, none of them have achieved the level of consensus.

With that caveat, let us present our next bullet:

• Religious beliefs persist because they are the indirect result of some other biological feature or features which directly promote reproductive fitness among those who have said features; however, the capacity for religion and predisposition towards religion is not, itself, reproductively advantageous.

If you have been reading these installments up to this point (and thank you very much!) you may well suspect that I'm about to conclude this installment. However, I would like to introduce one more brief hypothesis before rounding this out.

You may have noticed that we've progressed from a hypothesis which has a strong adaptive component, to one with a weaker adaptive component, to one which has a quasi-adaptive component. Thus far, every hypothesis has assumed that religion is, in some sense, in our genes.³ I think that it's time to introduce a proposition that doesn't require us to assume that humans have any innate genetic predisposition towards religion.

A while back, I wrote an essay titled "Towards a Theory of Architectural Morality". In the essay, I considered the controversy between theories of absolute morality and relativistic morality and concluded that both sides of the controversy were missing the point, which was that the reason we have morals is because morals serve a functional purpose. Specifically, societies require moral frameworks in order to provide the necessary stability for them to exist in the first place (and the existence of societies is, furthermore, preferable to the alternative). I also argued that, for these purposes, a society can be something as small as two individuals.

Might it be possible that religion serves a similar role? Certainly we find religion serving a great many social functions. In the majority of societies religion is responsible for legitimizing births, providing a focus point for the community, setting the framework for civil law, marriage ceremonies, funeral ceremonies, and so on. In most societies, religion has also provided legitimization for the head of state (or the ruling house). Many have viewed this trend as a natural attempt for religions to co-opt civil and secular power to themselves; however, it is possible to speculate that the reason these functions tend to fall to religion is that religion does a better job than its secular counterparts.

Even if we don't suppose that it is necessary for a society to embrace religion in order to provide civil functions, perhaps we may hypothesize that religion is necessary in order to prevent social collapse. Newt Gingrich once summarized this by saying that a society that tolerated atheists was fine but that a society of atheists couldn't survive.⁴

One particularly cynical variant of this is Plato's concept of The Noble Lie that says that the rules of the idea society (Plato's republic) must tell the populace that the structure of society is ordained by God. Others have extended the concept of The Noble Lie to the proposition that even if there is no God, a good society must promote belief in God in order to ensure that the people remain obedient to the law.

A less cynical variant rests on the proposition that people have a natural tendency to break rules (including laws) when two conditions are met: 1) the rule-breaking results in some perceived advantage for the rule breaker and 2) the rule breaker believes that he can break the rule with little or no consequence. Given this, laws are only effective to the degree that those who would break them fear being caught and punished. In this view, a god is sort of an ultimate cop who will, without fail, punish those who succumb to the temptation to break the rules. Those who do not believe in an ultimate cop are required to fall back on ethical injunctions and self-control which are weaker than the simple fear of being punished for doing wrong.

Does this not, however, lead us back to the Santa Claus dilemma that I outlined in the first installment? Not necessarily. Since Santa-belief does not serve a necessary social function, those societies that have a tradition of Santa belief have no vested interest in preventing people from losing their beliefs. Under this conjecture, since religion does serve a positive social function, it is more vital that societies strive to promote religious belief in their citizens and, consequently, we can expect that more energy and creativity will be devoted to ensuring this.⁵

It is possible to phrase this proposition in a negative form. If we suppose that societies without a strong religious tradition are inherently instable then the natural tendency, over time, will be for societies with religious traditions to become dominant and, in fact, ubiquitous since those societies which aren't will automatically remove themselves from consideration.

We can call this the Social Preservation Hypothesis. As such, let us add the bullet:

• Religion positively enhances the stability of those societies that embrace it. Consequently, those societies that fail to instill religious beliefs in a majority of their populations will have a tendency to collapse leaving behind only those societies which do instill such beliefs.

This shall conclude this week's installment. In next week's installment I will introduce one final hypothesis and, space permitting, reach the essay's conclusion.

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¹ Ron Smith.

² The problem I have with the alpha theory is that I am not convinced that all religions, or even the majority of religions in our history, have the hierarchical structure necessary to support the conjecture. Buddhism, as a case in point, does not clearly have anything at the top of the chain of deity. Be that as it may, something like this may well help to reinforce those religious beliefs that do have an alpha arrangement.

³ Please do not make the mistake that any of these hypotheses are examples of so-called "genetic determinism". Each of them should be understood in terms of genetic predispositions. Even if we go all the way and assume that there is some kind of "god gene" which accounts for religion in humans, there is no cause to assume that because person X has the gene that said person would, therefore, believe in any gods (to say nothing of specific gods). For more on this topic, see my essay titled "A Rebuttal to the A Priori Argument Against a Genetic Basis for Homosexuality".

⁴ The obvious objection to this is to note the existence of Communist governments such as China and the USSR; however, although atheism tends to be the official state creed of Communist governments, it is not clear that the populous of such governments, in general, actually reject their religious beliefs. It has also been conjectured that the goal of Communism was to set itself up as a sort of state quasi-religion, much in the same way that artificially constructed Cult of the Supreme Being was briefly made the state religion of France.

⁵ How a given society might accomplish this goal is open to speculation. One possibility might be found in the Jesuit maxim that if you give them a child for seven years, the child will be theirs for life. All that is required, for the hypothesis, however is the presumption that there does exist some technique or techniques whereby a culture could accomplish this general goal.