23 "So are you really saying that widespread belief in religion indicates nothing?" (An Introduction to Atheism)
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This article is from the Atheism FAQ, by mathew meta@pobox.com with numerous contributions by others.
23 "So are you really saying that widespread belief in religion indicates nothing?" (An Introduction to Atheism)
Not entirely. It certainly indicates that the religion in question has
properties which have helped it so spread so far.
The theory of memetics talks of "memes" -- sets of ideas which can
propagate themselves between human minds, by analogy with genes. Some
atheists view religions as sets of particularly successful parasitic
memes, which spread by encouraging their hosts to convert others. Some
memes avoid destruction by discouraging believers from questioning
doctrine, or by using peer pressure to keep one-time believers from
admitting that they were mistaken. Some religious memes even encourage
their hosts to destroy hosts controlled by other memes.
Of course, in the memetic view there is no particular virtue
associated with successful propagation of a meme. Religion is not a
good thing because of the number of people who believe it, any more
than a disease is a good thing because of the number of people who
have caught it.
The memetic approach has little to say about the truth of the
information in the memes, however.
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