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There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwini
by AussieWog93 4y ago
There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism.
Of course it's not everything, but I don't think humanism on its own would work without an older religion as its "bootstrap".
- rablackburn 4y agoI wouldn’t say it necessarily correlates with validity - Darwinism is about one thing: fitness of survival. I feel like if you squint a little you can see all the positive-memetic adaptations that get bolted on to organised religion. A commandment to “worship no other god but me” is a classic example of something that seems less like profound revelation and more like an effective memetic adaptation.
- tobylane 4y agoI don't consider myself a humanist, but I accept that my views are similar to them. I think humanism only exists because the way Christianity has been promoted recently forced the alternative to have a graspable answer rather than "I'm a good person for my own preference". UsefulChart's video on humanism may help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhz3SXPWkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWhz3SXPWkg
- stormking 4y ago> There's an argument to me made that the age/popularity of a belief system does correlate with validity, given that their individual memes are subject to Darwinism. Absolutely not, because the fitness, in an evolutionary sense, of those memes does not correlate with their truthfulness but with how easy they are to believe because they appeal to our fears, hopes and dreams. Take that "life after death" trope. The hard truth is that there isn't any, when you die, everything that made up "you" will be gone for good. But no religion based on that truth would ever thrive because the thought is just too scary and bleak.