How Memes Die: Southern Baptists Confirm Hell is Real

Well, the Southern Baptists have confirmed that they still believe in Hell. And it's still the horrible place where a sadistic God sends most of us to be cruelly tortured forever, merely because we don't fall for that whole strange story about Jesus.

Their declaration was a rebuttal to the immensely popular Pastor Ron Bell's new book, Love Wins, in which Bell questions the traditional view of Hell. Bell, like most thoughtful Christians, rejects the outdated eternal-torture idea of Hell. He sees Hell as grossly immoral and a misinterpretation of gospel.

I love this sort of infighting. It's like watching evolution in real time, something we don't get to do very often in the biological world. When we view religions (and all of human culture) as a vast set of interacting and competing memes, we become detached from the details of the you're-right-I'm-wrong battles. Instead of caring about the fine points of the competing theologies, we can be objective observers who record the outcome of an evolutionary struggle. We actually get to see the survival-of-the-fittest battle of religion memes in their ecology, the collective brains of humanity.

In this case, we get to see the Baptist memeplex losing territory because

Report on Low Christian Divorce Rates: Deceptive Math

The Baptist news and blog world is abuzz with a new report that refutes the common "myth" that Christians get divorced a lot. It's been a great embarrassment to conservative Christians that for all their talk of family values and morality, they actually get divorced more than average. It was so bad that the Southern Baptist Convention even held a serious debate and adopted a resolution to try to address the problem.

But now this new study claims to refute the high-Christian-divorce-rate myth. The study purports to show that divorce rates actually go down as people become more and more devout Christians. The more they pray together, attend church together and are committed to God, the less likely they are to be divorced.

But hang on a minute there ... don't they have the cart before the horse?

The study's authors claim that they've taken into account all sorts of confounding factors, such as age, income and education. But what they failed to take into account is Christianity itself.

This study doesn't prove that Christians stay married. It's just as likely that Christianity drives people away who are having marital problems. The only ones left are the blissfully married Christians! And then along comes a statistician who starts counting noses, and lo and behold, devout Christians have a low divorce rate.

Big surprise.

Conservative Christian churches are very judgmental about divorce. They believe and teach that