I am a new comer to this list, which I heard about from a friend who
joined over the summer and later pulled out. I have a few observations
to make about your basic philosophy of "true immortality" of meme
complexes.
>Virus is a collection of mutually-supporting ideas (a meme-complex)
>encompassing philosophy, science, technology, politics, and
>religion. The core ideas are based on evolution and memetics because
>one of the primary design goals was survivability through adaptation
>(religions die, not because they grow old, but because they become
>obsolete). If a new religion is designed around the premise of
>continuously integrating better (more accurate, more useful) concepts
>while ensuring the survival of its believers, it could conceivably
> achieve true immortality
Now, to begin with, as a Christian, I've run into a heck of a lot of people who think that if something is too good to be true, than it MUST be. This would slow the spread of a thought virus, possibly too much. In addition to that, religions die by stagnation. In the early Christian church, wavering believers did not exist- you believed or you didn't stick your neck out. After three hundred years with this mentality, the yet uncorrupted church was embraced by the Roman empire. Now, people joined for the same reasons fads flourish- it's just the socially accepted thing to do. These people wanted in for the name, not the ideas. Most didn't really believe- in fact, it was the meme equivalent to a vaccine. Years passed, the cycle repeated with the Muslims. Now, in this day and age, we persecute anything different, calling them cults. Don't you realize that by doing so, we're only creating "resistent strains"? Also, if a new religion is DESIGNED, than it must have so many facts for a self-respecting God-seeker that it would have to go above and beyond anything that could be created of the human imagination. Mind you, there are a lot of mindless drones who follow their parents' religion. I'm not talking about that. In response to your trust vs. faith discussion, I'd like to pose a completely different comparison, faith vs. religion.
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