Re: virus: Religion

Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Wed, 28 May 1997 13:49:43 -0500


John "Dry-Roasted Army Worm" Williams wrote:
> Holy Jesus, I think the Church has seen enough fracturing at this point. :-)
>
> Forgive this natural knee-jerk Christian response, but I really think that
> there needs to be a concerted Christian conversion effort... ;-)
>
> The Christian Left should attempt to convert the Christian Right.
> The Christian Left should attempt to convert non-Christians to tolerance of
> Christianity.

You wish to see your meme's spread? Or is it your meme's controlling
you to "reproduce" them? The question is really: why does this need to
be done? Is not the world a richer more interesting place because of
these differences?

> We can't do either of these by calling ourselves other than Christian. We
> can, however, subdevide it. "Christian Left." "NeoChristian."
> "Christian-humanist." "Process-Christian." Etc. But we have to stay
> Christian if we are going to make changes, because a lot of those need to
> happen within.

Here, here! Let the meme spread far and wide!

> Such a takeover has occured. The Baptists, pre-80s, were fairly liberal --
> until the Radical Right launched a concerted, cunning, and even sneaky
> campaign to take over the Southern Baptist convention; which included
> misrepresentation of candidates to Baptist administration structure,
> isolation and alienation of moderate and liberal Baptists in charge, etc. I

Now this is scary. What happened to all of the previous "left"
members?

> see no reason why the CL can't do the same, except maybe the same reason
> that keeps Liberals from being alowed to shoot all the conservatives (ie,
> we believe in gun control).

Funny how your own tolerance allows them to continue, eh? I'd say what
we have here is a classic case of memetics: The religious right's
concept of Christainity is the dominate one not because it's right (or
better than the "left" view) but because it reproduces better and
faster. How do we fight such a force?

(this looks like a question that could take years to answer... as I see
it, an answer to this question would be one of the fundamental things
that memetics teaches us)

"Kirt A. Dankmyer -- aka Loki" <dankmyka@wfu.edu> said
> Um, the current idea of Christianity, sure. I think there's an assertion
> here that that sort of thing doesn't _have_ to be a part of Christian
> faith. An acquaintance of mine who was "intelligent and Christian" gave up
> on calling himself a Christian because of problems like this. He started
> calling himself a "Joshuist" -- after Joshua, the original name of Jesus.
> (Or so he says. I haven't done the research he has.) I liked the idea of
> this sort of seperation -- wanting to distinguish himself from someone
> bound by dogma, but continuing to admit that Jesus had some interesting
> memes that were worth speading.
> -Loki

A Joshuist. You know, I had thought that a seperation would be good
too, but I think John is right. Christianity needs to be changed, and
the easiest way to do that is /from the inside out/ The only other way
is the so called "direct confrontation" method we talked about here a
while back that rarly if ever works.
-- the way I see it, then, the entire idea of the CoV is in question
here. We are competing directly for the same meme space with
Christianity, right? (this is why it is called Virus, right? To
deliberatly make people aware that we are going to change their views...
the CoV is founded on memetics, but it basically ignores all that
memetics can teach us about the spread of an idea. Why?) Why not just
try to modify Christianity so that it becomes the CoV, instead of trying
to convert people? (for instance, John's view of Christianity is quite
acceptable, right?)

ERiC

"It's the truth, even if it never happened." --Ken Kesey