First, you seems to think a meme is something unserious. Read Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene so you know what meme actually stands for rather than the thing y

First, you seems to think a meme is something unserious. Read Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene so you know what meme actually stands for rather than the thing you see on Reddit. GCC countries are resource economies mostly. They must weave a very narrow path to success to non-oil based means of income or the entire region collapses. I will say they do realize this is a problem and are using oil money to diversify, but resource curses are very hard to break and collapse can happen very quickly. "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son's son will ride a camel." --Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum >Most European development itself came from men of science who were Christian This is just stating that that in 1700 you were a Christian or you got hung (hell, pre-independence America was founded by people that thought that too few people were being hung). As we see when you take out the hanging or social shame part of the religion people tend to flee them as they are oppressive structures. You could say them being men of science either had no bearing to their religion, or was in spite of their religion. I am saying, for example, that the Abrahamic religions are bronze age (ok, sorry, Iron age) social structures. I don't think studied scholars are going to disagree on that point very much. People saw how people worked and could be sheppereded in societies without formal education and turned it into a series of stories that were effective in modifying peoples behaviors. Kings later came along and added their stories so they could further control the population. Over time a semi-coherent story about how people worked was formed below a set of rather incoherent stories regarding things that didn't happen that people are supposed to accept with faith.