Memes like "God promises life after death" explain popularity of religion

We usually think that religions require people to believe in certain things. Like God, heaven, life after death. But what if religiosity is more akin to a tune you just can't get out of your head than a consciously arrived-at system of beliefs?

Memes, according to Wikipedia, are "ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme."

They propagate and evolve much like genes do: through natural selection. Here's how Wikipedia says memes operate in the area of religion.

Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through the meme-exchange of proselytism. Most people will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels.

In Thought Contagion Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope.

Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief. Lynch asserts that belief in the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.

Makes sense to me. 

The meme hypothesis explains why core religious beliefs almost always have a strong appeal to people. By contrast, what I like to call "real reality" has lots of nasty aspects to it.

Death. Pain. Disease. Suffering. We are born. We die. In-between life and death there's both pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, good and bad. 

Such is the state of human affairs without the consolations of religion. Life after death. God's eternal love. Heavenly bliss.

It's easy to imagine how popular these notions would have been to the first Homo sapiens individuals who came up with them. And then how easily such religious memes would have found their way into other human minds. Today, get-rich-quick schemes spread like wildfire. Religious ideas would have been equally tempting to early members of our species, if not more so.

Memes don't have to be rationally (or irrationally) accepted. They're akin to viruses in that a meme can "infect" a mind without the person choosing to invite it in. People don't consciously choose to get a cold. A cold virus simply causes them to have cold symptoms.

Likewise, the meme theory of religiosity says that while religious beliefs may appear to be adopted, actually they may simply spread by virtue of their attractiveness to human minds.

Here's a short Richard Dawkins video where he talks about memes and religion.

Comments

[777]

Yes, Yes These Mêmes are not easily erased

When U see these Shi-ites in Karbala, Irak in long prossessions and slapping themselves with chains on the back
it's clear that we would have walked there
easily
if our parents had lived there

Hail to the method of Simran which even on its own
can wipe out undesirable or hindering stuff

Seth Shiv Dayal gave us a clever substance which starts with crushing the mêmes

The method is older and more basic than the mêmes

Plus when results come you see the relativity of everything on earth
and also the Truth ( unifying Law )
It results in invulnerability and you see that you always were, always were that sweet Sound
and not the mêmes

I love really all readers here

777

<3

[al]

Lovely piece of knowledge, Brian. We have been memed to death, literally. Our spirits have been totally made captive of memes and the propagandists (media of any sort, mainstream and alternative) know it, capitalize on it, utilize memes like bullets from a fifty caliber machine gun with an infinite supply of ammunition. What is not a meme? In Eastern philosophy we have the term "vritti" or "vishaya" or "kalpana" to describe mental desires/whims/thoughts which coagulate to form the beliefs we choose to hold sacred. The mind has many levels of operation and includes the dumbest of idiots to the most gifted genius. Its food is the meme and the mind is always eating, digesting and eliminating memes, much like the physical body does with victuals. 777 has posted a lovely note and I wholeheartedly salute the three modes of the Saints to lighten the burden of memes, eventually culminating in the realization that all is Love, including one's very Self. Memes change...love is eternal and does not suffer diminution or change of any sort. Love is covered up - obfuscated - by memes. Not everyone will see that memes are the support of ego and personality, which constitute a false existence. Not everyone will desire riddance from memes. Those few that see the masquerade and charade of memes, in my opinion, are awakening.

[porter]

Interesting theory. It sounds very familiar.

Mat 23:15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees hypocrites; because you go about the sea and the dry, to make one proselyte; and when he becomes, you make him a son of Gehenna double of you.

The whole point of a virus is to grow and spread.

[Andrew Kinsella]

Atheism is a meme too.
The trouble with this theory, particularly as expounded by Dawkins, is the implicit idea that the person advancing the meme idea is uniquely free of their contagion.

Equally, on the question of the after life and of the existence of Gods, or other ethereal, non corporeal beings, there is such diversity between religions that generalisations such as are usually made about religions are simply not applicable.

This comment of yours " By contrast, what I like to call "real reality" has lots of nasty aspects to it.
Death. Pain. Disease. Suffering. We are born. We die. In-between life and death there's both pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, good and bad. " is actually a straight restatement of The Buddha's first noble truth. The rest of Buddhism is about understanding this reality and learning how to negotiate life with out unnecessary suffering. Pain is inescapable as "all compounded things" like bodies and relationships are subject to decay. I can guarantee that the arthritis in my neck is painful right now- thats only too real.

[777]

3 m-emes :

Shi-ite (Hussein ) vs Sunnites
Rome ( Saints ) vs Protestants
RSSB ( Saints ) vs Agra same for Khalsa
Buddhism small Path vs Grand Path or so

Founder was succeeded vs Was NOT succeeded
So it's always the same même

One must really have a sturdy constant look in the INSIDE
and also daily recurring serendipities
One who has that bows to all others in sincere humility
and again , :
Intuition + psychic vs IQ or a reasonable mix of these to can do ( =mihf)

777

ps
If The Ocean comes to you as aLover, . . Be quick, marry her
Nothing in existance can be equal to this
The King's Falcon has landed on your shouder
Rumi ( paraphrased )

[al]

Nice addition, Andrew...thanks. Generally speaking in my estimation, any concept can become an ensconced meme, thus forming a belief. Therein lies the jail cell with its unknowing prisoner. Awakening from the hypnosis of memes is no easy task. Some type of internal practice must be undertaken to penetrate the many layers of illusion and delusion that constitute the accepted beliefs of this world. A "meme-buster" is a real revolutionary, a telltale characteristic of a seeker of truth. Since memes are ubiquitous and involve every belief and sacred opinion that the individual has, it is not long before we find that everyone has been taken over by memes, including ourselves! That is, the indwelling consciousness, essentially a pure untarnished force, has been absorbed by thought forms/streams beginning with programming on mother's knee, extending into secular education and religious indoctrination. My resonance with Eastern yogic disciplines from an early age has made me into a consummate meme-buster within my own awareness. "Citta santana" is the term yogis use to describe the continual flow of thought streams within the mind. In fact, Brian's lovely website here is also a meme-buster and shows an evolved man dissatisfied with second hand knowledge, especially from religious pulpits. For the consciousness to exit the entirety of meme influence is to attain jivan mukti - self realization, a consciousness that is free of all taint of mind and matter. Individuals who have reached this state, we are told, are very rare.

[manjit]

Yeah, but memes like "Memes like "God promises life after death" explain popularity of religion" explain the popularity of today's trendy atheism.

Isn't it wonderful this world we have manifested with our minds?

[Sam henry]

Interesting theory.
Yet, I'm always leery of any claim that says A causes B. It's probably more that there is some correlation between the two.
But propaganda is anytime you start with the idea one view is more correct than the other, and I'm not sure Atheism is any less a meme.
It's almost like a complaint about how the brain works more than an insight into religion to me