"He then takes a one-sided view, accentuates the bad, ignores the good, focuses on the least reasonable religious people he can find, and calls it a day." The

"He then takes a one-sided view, accentuates the bad, ignores the good, focuses on the least reasonable religious people he can find, and calls it a day." The flaw in his arguments is actually deeper: he takes a two-sided view, falling into the fallacy of the excluded middle. If we posit (1) the existence of his memetic engine, and (2) its apparent propensity to self activate, then a good scientist must ask what results from self activation when a basic subsistence meme is not available or needed. In other words, what is the nature of the memetic engine's idle task (to extend his computer metaphor)? Moreover, what type of memetic idle task might be designed by a community of rational minds whose basic survival needs are being met? We might reasonably predict that the non-subsistence meme pool would fall into a stable pattern that is self-consistent, simply for the sake of having a stable self-consistent framework upon which other social activities can be installed. I would expect it to look like a typical computer programming framework, with a great deal of intricate structure, much of which is not susceptible to trivial performance analysis. We can even amuse ourselves by looking for other religion-software analogies. Are there any religious patterns analogous to a fixed-point combinator? Introspection? Debugging?