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Take a look at the very question we are asking, if you
would, and don't be shocked to discover it carries its own answer. "Where
do religions come from"? The fact that we think we really don't know the
answer offers such a forceful hint it almost slaps us in the face. Look at
the circumstances from which attempted answers come, and see that for
yourself.
Let us understand 'religion' as a term under which all the
cults and sects seek shelter and identity, so that it applies to all of
them and not just one or a few. Religion already exists as a prevalent
condition in our time, so most religious answers will be in the form of
apologia, which means they are written in self-defense or
self-justification. A pool of such answers, over time, serves as
additional information from which the cults and sects later draw for their
own use as 'talking points'. They may draw from the overall apologia
provided by religion, by the cult whose name they apply to themselves, or
by the sect (denomination, faction, order, etc.) that most appeals to
them. Appealing apologia can enhance the cult's ability to persuade and so
increase its power and believability, and so will succeed. Those which
fail to appeal will, well, not many people worship sticks and rocks in our
time.
That appears to be a reasonable and nonjudgmental
explanation of how religions developed, but it says nothing about how they
began. That, however, seems simple, obvious, and for the only reason that
could lead to the foregoing. Even though it is the exact reason that gives
rise to science, many people will condemn whomever may give it voice:
religion arises from ignorance and a need to know. Now, was that so bad,
and so hateful? The truth hurts, and maybe that welling pain serves as an
indicator of its presence as your memeplex prods you to rebel against such
information.
Look: If science and religion alike arise from ignorance,
how does one turn into rituals, puffery and dangerous attitudes while the
other plays mostly in the background unless some startling discovery or
statement puts it under the social lens?
ENTER MEMES: Put forth by Richard Dawkins in the
early 1970s, memes has slowly developed into an idea capable to explain in
simple, illustrative terms how ideas spread through human (and
some other animal) populations. Memes exist, as Dawkins explained it, as
resident in the nervous systems of their hosts. They exist the same as
ideas exist aside from being memes, much the way programs exist on a
computer's hard drive, in the form of information that the computer— or
the host of memes —knows in such a way that it can be called upon whenever
the host finds it necessary.
Programs, also like memes, can be copied from one computer
to another; it's just that memeplexes work on live computers (wetware) and
programs work on machines (hardware). Data relative to those programs can
be displayed on a screen, sent to a printer to appear on paper,
transformed into electrical signals and sent through the air or over wires
to distant locations, and more. The information that makes the program,
the data, or the memes can be recognized as such wherever it appears and
in whatever form, by whomever can read, hear, or interpret it. That is not
to say that memes are more or less real than any other phenomena, but to
show they do take a recognizable form and have describable
characteristics. That they do have forms and recognizability confers
acknowledgement of their material existence and, from that, the granting
to them of realness.
Computer programs are an equivalent of what Susan
 Blackmore
coined "memeplexes"— bits of information conjoined with other information
toward a recognizable end. Memes get described as capable to "take over"
their hosts to support their own purposes, again the same as programs on a
computer: bits of information working in consort to accomplish an aim that
serves their own interests—even though they have no awareness of those
interests, nor even of their own existence (another feature common to
computer programs and human "programs"). Programs that serve their own
ends at their hosts' expense are parasitical, whether they are computer
viruses, viral physical infections, or memeplexes. All share very similar
characteristics according to their inherent environments, all are either
real or unreal, and one cannot be discredited from effective existence for
any reasons that do not apply to all of them.
Dawkins later expounded about the extended phenotype in a
book by that name. That went to describe how one set of genes can serve
the purposes of an unrelated set. If I grasped the idea of that, it shows
how a lifeform will serve another lifeform's purposes. A somewhat
symbiotic relationship of that sort may be found in cattle, that humans
care for in return for their use in our food supplies. Any individual cow
may not agree the relationship serves both animals, but as a species
cattle do benefit from our care, and the fact that we weed them out so the
best stock gets replicated; best being, of course, what best fits with the
described circumstances.
Workers at a factory may share such a relationship with
their employers. The worker (one genetic set) performs a task at the
employer's behest (the employer is a different genetic set) that
supposedly benefits them both. Here, a case could maybe be made that the
phenotype goes both directions: the employees do their tasks, the employer
runs a business so he can write their paychecks and provide other
perquisites to which he has access. Evolutionarily speaking, employees do
get weeded out according to their fit at their assigned tasks and their
dedication and fit to the required lifestyle.
A parasitical relationship develops when human beings serve
as hosts for germs that end up killing them. If the lot of us end up
destroying our planet, we will, in turn, prove ourselves to have been
parasites upon all forms of life, having stolen their resources to our
mutual doom.
Phenotypic information arrives in a form of memes as ideas
take precedence in human minds (the human operating system) and begin to
spread throughout a human group. Memes invade that operating system by
feeding information to it and by inducing it to seek reinforcement for
that information. As information, memes take many forms: as ideas present
in a human's mental system, as scripts on paper, stone, wood, or whatever;
as magnetic variations on a prepared medium (recordings); as vibrations of
air whenever they are vocally expressed and of eardrums and variations in
an electrical signal when received; as photon variations when transmitted;
as variations in phosphor patterns on computer and TV screens: All of them
are material presences of one kind or another, all of which require
interpretation to gather their meaning.
Phenotypic memes, then, act as ghost writers upon human
nervous systems to store information there about themselves, and to spawn
activities and attitudes that serve to perpetuate survival and replication
for such memes. They do so by gaining control of the system, "becoming"
the identity of each host the same as a virus "becomes" the operating
system in a computer. The sense of self
gets lost as the memeplex usurps each human identity, gains control by
whatever means possible, and steers the person away from whatever he or
she might have become had this not happened. The high level of
unhappiness, stress, and criminality in religion-dominated areas of the
world result from the prevalence of this.
1Recent
studies have confirmed that statement, as published in a British
newspaper, by comparing cultures dominated by theocratic systems with
those run by secular democracies. In the study reported, the United States
singularly stood as a secular democracy with heavy religious influences,
and the same health and stress conditions that predominated in the
theocratic countries.
As with the example about cattle, this may or may not be
good for the human race, but it destroys individuals in ways that, by any
standards of humaneness, have to be deemed immoral.
So, how do science and religion, both seeking the same
ends, differ so widely from each other? First and foremost is the absence
of the highly honed scientific method in religion, and a complete absence
of understanding about how it works (something that serves as a waving,
frantic flag when nonscientific ventures such as Intelligent Design stake
their claims on "science" and the work of "scientists"). The method most
likely developed in its baby phase not as a product of intention, but of
curiosity and the kind of questions that curiosity elicited.
Two kinds of people may have observed very similar
phenomena (not necessarily in the same place nor in the same span of time,
nor necessarily only once). Questions such as, "I wonder what caused
that," and "I wonder what that means" inspire responses very different
from, "I wonder what would happen if …" and "I wonder how to make that
happen again." From the former, we can safely predict, religion will
arise, and science from the latter.
ENTER VESTED INTERESTS: The wonder about causes and
meaning from which religions rose does not inspire a "digging in the
ground" response, but does beget the same derring do kind of approach that
gets prompted by the necessity to survive in the midst of threatening,
chaotic environments. People disappearing in the dark, bolts of light and
loud thunder, people getting eaten from the inside by all kinds of
diseases, would provide circumstances that would keep primitive survivors
guessing, cautious and afraid of the unknown. Driven to make that unknown
knowable, can we not see how they would venture their best guesses about
the strangeness of this world, and deem that those who survived the
longest made the most number of guesses right? Such guesses would quickly
become adopted and grow into memeplexes that, when they would eventually
fail, required more guesses about what might have gone wrong.
Listen to the preachers on TV and your radio after the next
tsunami or other devastating event anywhere in the world, busily
denouncing the sinners who brought down the wrath of the Almighty. Judging
from today's practices, anyone who ventured into taboo practices would be
the first to get blamed.
Those taboos represent vested interests, that people had
given their lives so that others could have a "right way to live"
demonstrated to them. When simple rituals to demonstrate contrition
failed, most likely something requiring more effort would replace it,
anything to get the proper god's attention would be tried. Sooner or later
circumstances would change and a new ritual would become part of the game
plan. A developing memeplex would become increasingly complicated to the
point where villages would appoint those who'd serve as priests whose
survival might well depend on his ability to appear successful, and to
quickly contrive convincing apologia for the inevitable failures. Rather
than argue over what is necessarily conjecture, draw your own scenarios
about how this would lead to such concepts as sin, guilt, blame, demons,
evil and all the rest of the religious baggage that survives to surpass
our own span in time.
It seems not too much of a stretch to say that the
foundation for religious memes began in that ancient scenario, in the same
empty but interested minds from which science arose, but as a result of
different kinds of questions, and their different ways to gain some
answers. |
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