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I can almost imagine a high priest of ages past: "You must toil hard and suffer through your miserable life, because if you are a good person, after you're dea

I can almost imagine a high priest of ages past: "You must toil hard and suffer through your miserable life, because if you are a good person, after you're dead you'll experience the sublime eternity of the heavens". Then people start killing themselves to get to heaven faster. The high priest pauses, thinks and pronounces: "Oh, and whoever commits suicide goes straight to hell, no questions asked".

colechristensen 11y ago
There doesn't even have to be intent. Take 1000 different cultures with a random selection of moral values, unique to each. The moral values they hold dear, especially in early development, will have a very real effect on the survival of it's followers. Culture evolves right along with genetic code. The culture you're born into has very real effects to your survival fitness. Certain traits of religions survive better.
- jxramos 11y ago
  I've been meditating a lot on these cultural heritages. The fact that a given religion/culture exists and can be criticized or accepted or anything inbetween takes for granted why this religion exists at all and has perhaps survived many generations, maybe even millennia while those that no longer exist are out of sight out of mind. I can no longer buy the idea of cultures that cross generations with all their traditions being the result of some arbitrary thing open to whatever the fads and fashions of surrounding cultures they pass through. Survival of anything is not random. Hard to articulate these thoughts.
  - colechristensen 11y ago
    The word 'meme' was coined in "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins as an analog to the gene. A meme is an arbitrary unit of culture in the same way a gene is an arbitrary unit of genetic material. Both, the theory goes, are equal parts of the process of evolution. Memes are inherited and go through the same processes of evolution. You're right, they aren't arbitrary or random, they're evolved. Much like many of our genetic features, the advent of modern society and technology has made much of our cultural inheritance obsolete, vestigial, no longer fit.

colechristensen 11y ago

There doesn't even have to be intent. Take 1000 different cultures with a random selection of moral values, unique to each. The moral values they hold dear, especially in early development, will have a very real effect on the survival of it's followers. Culture evolves right along with genetic code. The culture you're born into has very real effects to your survival fitness. Certain traits of religions survive better.

jxramos 11y ago
I've been meditating a lot on these cultural heritages. The fact that a given religion/culture exists and can be criticized or accepted or anything inbetween takes for granted why this religion exists at all and has perhaps survived many generations, maybe even millennia while those that no longer exist are out of sight out of mind. I can no longer buy the idea of cultures that cross generations with all their traditions being the result of some arbitrary thing open to whatever the fads and fashions of surrounding cultures they pass through. Survival of anything is not random. Hard to articulate these thoughts.
- colechristensen 11y ago
  The word 'meme' was coined in "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins as an analog to the gene. A meme is an arbitrary unit of culture in the same way a gene is an arbitrary unit of genetic material. Both, the theory goes, are equal parts of the process of evolution. Memes are inherited and go through the same processes of evolution. You're right, they aren't arbitrary or random, they're evolved. Much like many of our genetic features, the advent of modern society and technology has made much of our cultural inheritance obsolete, vestigial, no longer fit.