Debugging Religion

Wow, I go away for a couple weeks and come back to find loads of quality thought provoking stuff with regards to the continuing friction between Islam's 1.2 Billion adherents and just about everybody else on the planet. That set me to thinking about religion in general and it occurred to me that it might be constructive to get everyone's views on the subject so that I can better frame some of the responses I read here as well as further inform my own current views with other people's perspectives. So I will start by laying out my own current thinking and ask you all to share your views as well:

Islam, like all organized religious philosophies, is a meme - a complex socio/cultural program or software. Not unlike viruses, memes are self-propagating and constantly changing organisms. The human mind is a platform capable of, and indeed bound to, executing memes. Ever heard a jingle on the radio you couldn't get out of your head for the rest of the day? That's a meme. Religion is a very elaborate and highly articulated jingle.

The human experience is one of constant interaction between countless memes. From the individual (the nursery rhymes you learned as a child, the habits you absorbed from marketers during adolescence, the religion you raise your children in) to the mass of society (the dominant religions in different countries, the holidays celebrated in various parts of the world, the art forms produced by particular societies, the diplomatic and economic traditions that guide the interactions between nations, etc), life consists in large part of the constant execution of programmed behavior, the interactions of these innumerable programs, and the mark that these interactions leave upon the memory - both an individual's memory and the mass cultural memory.

It can be reasonably argued that mother nature gave all animals this tendency to execute programmed behavior as a means of replicating beneficial learning. We couldn't evolve from single-celled creatures without it (if you believe that sort of thing). But this tendency can also be counter-productive. The human mind, starting out as a clean slate (we are all "booted up" at birth), is immediately assaulted by all sorts of code, both beneficial as well as nefarious. Learning a language or a musical instrument is clearly useful to a child, while picking up profanity from his parents while they are in an argument or taking up cigarettes in junior high because its "cool" might serve a less wholesome purpose.

Highly complex behavioral regimes, such as religion, can incorporate both beneficial as well as malignant code (bugs). On the plus side, religion has historically been the supreme mechanism by which society has enforced a common set of behaviors that allows humans to function and succeed as an organized group. Before there were statutes and laws our forebears knew to do the right thing lest a whole host of major and minor deities rain rage and ruin upon their mistaken heads. Even now religion is a strong and positive force in encouraging constructive behavior. The fact that the law may not catch you but your god is always watching has a tempering effect on billions of people's destructive tendencies. Religions in large part also encourage charitable behavior and are the only major pillar of society that do so.

Organized religions also have some tendencies that, while they are contrived to ensure the propagation of that particular religion, have an adverse effect on greater human society:

>Religion demands exclusion of alternate thought. The core tenets of major religions are fairly absolute and not open to review under the light of new or competing evidence. Alternate ideas are discouraged and adherents are threatened with exclusion or eternal damnation for embracing alternate thought. The Dark Ages were a time of extensive religious control over society and look at what that wrought. Everyone believed the world was flat and woe betide the man who dared claim otherwise. Untold millions were burned, drawn, quartered, and otherwise tortured and murdered as a result of mystical beliefs created and spread by the church. At the same time rational thought and empirical learning were strongly discouraged because they were viewed, correctly, as rivals to the sway that organized religion held over the groupthink of the time. Its no concidence that man did not learn how to fly during the Dark Ages.

>Religion is a dictatorship of philosophy. Most major religions have one individual or a small group of them that set down the core belief structure and the resulting organization exists for the propagation of those beliefs as well as its own replication. These core belief structure is often very resitant to change. Usually a small group of arbiters decides how that belief structure is to be interpreted and applied. This puts undue power and influence in the hands of those whose vested interests lie closer to the maintenance of core belief set, regardless of how much in error it may be, than to the advancement of greater society as a whole.

>Religion is exclusionary by its very nature as an organized group despite all the preaching adherents of various religions may wish to do to the contrary. If you do not adhere to the core belief set of a religion you are simply not a member of that group and probably subject to whatever set of punishments those beliefs require for lack of adherence. This feeds perfectly into the natural human tendency to hold a lesser view of those that are unlike us, so a mechanism contrived for the replication of one particular philosphy is destructive to greater society. Witness the sectarian strife around the globe. This could be the most destructive tendency of religion at the moment.

The organized religious construct (The Iconoclast conversationally refers to this as the ORC) is by far the most aggressively self-propagating meme that the human species has yet devised. Of all the major organizational pillars in society religion is the longest lived and most culturally entrenched. It outlasts government: the United States, the oldest continuous constitutional democracy in the world, has survived for barely two and a quarter centuries, while the youngest of the world's major religions, Islam, is at fifteen centuries and going strong. And it trumps the bonds of kin and country: most fervent religious believers would choose their god over their country, or their own eternal salvation over the current economic or physical welfare of their friends and family.

In short, the ORC is here to stay for the foreseable future. So the question is whether it will move humanity forward or set us back? Religion can and will continue to serve a positive purpose in society through its discouragement of destructive behavior and its encouragement of charity. But it will also continue to serve a growingly destructive purpose due to its exclusionary tendencies and its concentration of power over thought.

Which of these two forces will reach their apex first? How long before some radical religionist, in the name of his god, starts the chain of events that sets our species back 500 years? Or will the peace/love aspects of religious philosophy overwhelm this urge and eventually move us forward into a state of global happiness and mutually beneficial progress ala Star Trek? If our species is to attain the next level of societal evolution we must work the bugs out of our cultural software.

Please share thoughts. And also please remember that nothing I have said here is intended as a judgment of any particular belief set as I respect everyone's right to subscribe to the answers to their own questions. I welcome other people's thoughts and observations on religion, whether believer or skeptic, as it will further inform my thinking on the subject.


-Ico