The Religion Virus by Craig A. James

Author:Craig A. James [James, Craig A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: O Books
Published: 2010-10-03T05:00:00+00:00

Synergy: Guilt, Heaven, Hell, and Monotheism

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

– George Santayana (1863-1952)

To wrap up this chapter, let's take a look at synergy – memes that work together. One of the recurring themes throughout this book is the memeplex, a group of mutually supporting memes that together are more than the sum of the parts. The three memes we just studied – Intolerance, Guilt, and Heaven/Hell, plus the Monotheism meme from earlier – are a perfect example of this.

Let's start with a peculiar feature of Monotheism. A polytheist might worship one god over another, but it is purely a practical matter – you pray to a god of love for romance, and a god of war for victory. The idea that you might pick one of the gods and say, "This is the only real god, all the others are fakes," doesn't make sense to a polytheist. But the monotheist has made exactly this choice: He has picked one particular god out, and declared that everyone else is wrong. If you could step back 3000 years and forget everything you'd been taught in this modern age, you would probably think the monotheist's beliefs were arrogant and wrong.

Given the monotheist's decision to select just one god above all others, it's not a very big step to select one church over all others, and declare that not only is Yahweh the one and only god, but our particular interpretation of the Bible is the one and the only correct one. And this leads to the final leap: You can only get saved by Jesus from your sins by our particular church. We have the rules, we have the exclusive correct interpretation of the scriptures, and any deviation from these rules will result in your eternal damnation in Hell. (Again I remind readers that not all Christian denominations make these claims, but some do.)

Pretty strong stuff, isn't it? This is what you might call a "corollary meme" – let's call it the Monochurch meme – the "our church is the only church" meme. Now let's see how this Monochurch meme interacts with the others.

The Intolerance meme gave religion a huge boost in popularity, because it gave people strong reasons to believe (or pretend to believe) in Yahweh. The Intolerance meme was the first active weapon that religions used against each other, giving them license to destroy one another's temples and kill one another's members This was a great advance for the Religion Virus memeplex, but like all coercive forces, if it's the only motivation, it leads to reluctant, half-hearted followers.

Next came the Guilt meme, which vilified feelings that every healthy human has: sex, hunger, desire, pride, fatigue – pretty much everything good in life was now bad. Previously (for example, under Greek ethics), you had to do something bad in order to feel guilt, but with the Christian's new-found sins, you were guilty simply for being human. On top of

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