Let's All Wear "God Sucks" Buttons to Work

I have an idea – let's get a bunch of big, red "God Sucks" buttons, pin them on our chests, and go to work! If you work in a grocery store, or a bank, or at the welfare office, or maybe even as a Justice of the Peace ... no problem! I'm sure your employer won't fire you. Offend shoppers? Piss off welfare recipients? Horrify the couple you're marrying? It's your right!
Don't believe me? Just listen to this attorney about an identical case, defending her client:

"There are federal and state laws that protect against religious discrimination. It's not like he was out in the aisles preaching to people." – Kara Skorupa, attorney.

But you know, I have a pretty good feeling Skorupa wouldn't take my case if I got fired for wearing a "God Sucks" button. Like many conservative religious people, Skorupa and her client,Trevor Keezor, probably think the law should protect Christians (I'm guessing he's a Christian) who violate their employers' policies, but if an atheist or Muslim did the same thing, I'd be willing to bet they'd sing a different song.

Keezor was fired for violating Home Depot's dress code, which prohibits any and all buttons and badges, except those issued by Home Depot. He took the job knowing full well what was expected of him, and Home Depot's dress code is 100% legal under the US Constitution, yet he thinks that he should be exempt, just because, "I support my country and God."

This is another great example of a "proselyzation meme," a technique that religions have developed down through the centuries as they evolved and mutated in the "survival of the fittest" battle we call cultural evolution, or memetics. Cultural evolution treats ideas as evolutionary raw material, and uses Darwinistic principles to predict how they'll reproduces, mutate and evolve.

It's a lot like sex, in fact, it's exactly parallel. In biological systems, each creature has to have a way of making copies of itself in order to carry on. Whether it's a bacterium splitting, or two whales mating, we all gotta do it! Otherwise our species goes extinct.

And the cool thing about sex is that we like it, because all of our ancestors, every single one of them, liked sex too. If even one of them didn't, well, we'd have never been born.

Religions are like that too. Any religion that doesn't have a way to spread itself, both across society and down through time, will quickly become extinct. More importantly, the religions that have the strongest proselytizing efforts (i.e. the memes that tell members to "spread God's word") are the ones that steal members from other churches and thereby gain memberships.

With sex, the ones who like it the most are the ones who have the most babies, and generation after generation, their descendants will inexorably grow at the expense of those who like sex less.

It's identical with churches. The ones with the strongest proselytizing memes are the ones that grow. Think about the Mormons, for example: They're the fastest growing church around. When was the last time a Catholic knocked on your door? The Catholic church is losing ground as a percentage of our population, and most other Christian churches are shrinking even faster than the Catholic Church.

So it's no surprise that most religions have a strong meme that says their members should actively spread God's word. And Mr. Keezor was just helping his Church with the memetic version of sex: spreading the memes, helping them reproduce, making sure that his particular branch of religion will survive in the endless Darwinian struggle of my-God-versus-yours.