I see them as something akin to hyperactive zombies, their selfness deposed and displaced by the memeplex that now drives each one of them, and drives them as groups. The parasitic memeplex that has stolen their physical beings has only one purpose, which is for itself to survive and grow at any cost, and it will more than hate anything or anyone that could be a threat against that. It knows to accuse such persons and malign such things to distract attention away from itself. That is the why for the taunting.

That is why fundamentalists of any religion will criticize us personally, as a group, and misrepresent anything we stand for, that we will defend ourselves and our ideals (though we have not all the same, and though we will argue with each other about them, we do tolerate our differences) for it serves to distract us from presenting anything meaningful about them. They know their own weaknesses. They know what they cannot defend. They know how to avoid that and steer us away from that, while we remain naive that we healthy few can stand strong and immune against all the diseases of the many.

Yes, it is right to compare religion to diseases, for both have varying stages of their plagues and a variety of their effects. Religion shows itself in forms ranging from just a little bit sick all the way through fundamentalism to full blown theocratic fascism, and they exhibit various forms of contagion. The worst can be correctly identified as parasitical memeplexes.

 That there were not even two dozen terrorists who rode the three commercial planes on the day the Twin Towers fell shows quite well what is meant by the term 'parasitic memeplex'. It will induce human beings to destroy themselves if it sees a way to benefit. Did it work?--or, does it? Consider all the events that one set of events has induced to occur, that our nationally ill-considered response (driven by a competing parasitic memeplex) has caused us to become embroiled within, the process of which has increased rather than delimited the number of terrorists in the world, and hardened sympathies against our nation. That same process now depletes our funds, worsens the lives of our citizens, and disengages us from our nation's own internal concerns while our own leaders advantage themselves at our expense.

The parasitic memeplex most rampant in our country has the same interest as any other: self-survival and self-increase even at the expense of all those who serve as its hosts.

Now: You may feel concerned because I express my thoughts as though I believe memeplexes to be living entities, and this has often been a subject of argument by those who seek objective measures for anything they feel obliged to consider real. That is only a right and proper requirement for any atheist to pose against such an idea as this one about memes and memeplexes.

Please try to understand the way I look at things.

First, think of a strip of recording tape with your favorite song on it: It looks no different than any blank tape, and yet you will proudly say its title and expect that no one will doubt your word: that is your favorite song. It exists and is real only because time passes, and because you have a method by which you can cause it to reproduce the music during any span of time you choose. You can demonstrate its existence as something real, though invisible to anything but the proper instruments of detection and reproduction. Think of memes as recorded on human brains, from where they can be reproduced at any opportune time, and you may recognize the music on the tape, invisible to any of your senses on its own, as a complex of memes. They are one and the same thing (you can hear the tune playing in your head sometimes) but resident on different mediums.

Secondly, I have discovered that by viewing all of existence as a complex hierarchy of events and processes, I can gain insights into the nature of things that otherwise escaped me. Memes is one of those: ideas (memes are copyable ideas) do not have a physical presence, but we conceive of them as something real. We do that because we can pinpoint an origin for any idea and trace its results through sequences of actions and consequences until the present. The idea and its results exist within a continuum, which is to say something akin to they exist through time.

Any idea originates in a human brain and afterward resides there as a memory. It gets drawn upon to express it to others, thus demonstrating its pseudo-physical presence. That others can and will repeat it demonstrates that it increases its occupied territory. That some others will use it will cause it to be manifested into a process wherein we can recognize it (if we knew about it) and even go so far as to evaluate and criticize it. If a meme can join other memes and ideas to develop a memeplex, and if it is of the type that tends to induce compulsive behaviors, it makes interactive use of human brains belonging to its hosts to become a calculating threat against anything that might act to delimit its growth, development and spread.

A memeplex resident in a group of brains has the advantage of superior computing power over a lone individual, as anyone can attest who was ever involved in a brainstorming session. Religions, especially the organized kinds so common in our world, involve groups of brains as a matter of course. They work together to develop tactics that go beyond mere defense, and work at aggression to overwhelm their competitor-memeplexes and subdue them in a kind of predatory program of prevention. Keeping in mind that, via their residency and dominance of human brains, memeplexes make of themselves a pseudo-lifeform. Any form of life will regard other forms as prey or as threats, and treat them accordingly. From that, we gain an understanding of why a memeplex will drive its hosts to see other memeplexes as akin to diseases and  attempt to eradicate them.

People will either see that or they won't, but it does serve to explain the Twin Towers terrorists' actions, and those common to theists of all kinds, and also why fascism grows among fundamentalists of any kind and spreads throughout a nation even though set up as a secular state. I hope this rough and simplistic presentation has been cogent enough to make that clear. I hope you can see the importance of understanding it.

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Copyright ©2007 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.