H1N1 inspires religious immunity

I now have the H1N1 vaccine in my body, running around stimulating my immune system, in a "fake fight" that will prepare my immune system for the real thing. And this got me to thinking about how religion does the exact same thing, but via ideas (memes) that it uses to inoculate the young against atheism and "false" religions.

One of the cool things about studying religion via cultural evolution, called "memetics" (the application of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" to ideas as they move across society and down through history) is that religion exhibits all of the same survival mechanisms as biological life, including a robust immune system. Just as your body reacts to threats, so does religion.

How do you keep a child from "catching" a religious "disease," that is, from straying from your faith? It's simple. Starting from an early age, you have to implant immunity "memes" (ideas) into the child, ideas that make the child resistant to the "disease" (other religions, or atheist ideas).

There are two parts to this immunity: First, you teach the child that your religion is great and wonderful, and that the rewards for staying on the "true" course are magnificent. And second, you teach your child that the other religions are false, and that if the child strays from your path, unimaginable punishment awaits.

Once these ideas are implanted in the child, it becomes very hard indeed for any other ideas to infect the child. He or she can be turned loose into adult society, and will resist all other religious infections for a lifetime.

It's critical to get my H1N1 vaccine before the disease strikes, because without immunity I'm likely to fall victim to the virus. And not surprisingly, this is also true of religious immunity: If you wait too long, the child might be infected by the wrong memes (other religions, or even atheist memes) before you've had a chance to develop the child's immunity via your own memetic inoculation.

That's why all major religions have highly-developed programs to teach children starting from a very young age. It's never too early to begin the religious indoctrination. To those of us who study memetics, it's exactly parallel to the H1N1 inoculation that is now circulating through my body.

Medical Freeloaders: Christians who Refuse Immunizations are Parasites

Parents who refuse vaccinations for their children on religious/moral grounds are nothing more than parasites on the rest of us. They claim that God will protect them, or that if their children get ill or die, it is "God's will." In reality, it's just big talk, because their children are protected from disease by a "shield" that the rest of us provide when we accept the slight risk of immunization for our children. Called the "herd immunity," it happens when 80-95% of the population is immunized: If a disease, say measles, strikes one child, but 95% of the children are immunized, the disease can't spread, because the immunized children block it.

How many of these religious zealots would abandon their beliefs after their first child died, then their second, then third... Just how strong is their faith in God's will? If a vaccine was just a short drive into town, and half their children were six feet under the ground, would they really still believe that this is what God wanted?

Just a hundred years ago, almost half of all children died before reaching adulthood, yet today, thanks to vaccinations and responsible parents, most kids today reach adulthood having never seen anyone die. They never see any one crippled from polio, disfigured by smallpox, blinded by syphilis, or deaf from an ear infection. These religious zealots are far removed from the reality of "God's will." According to their beliefs, we should let half the children in America die, even though we could prevent it.

That is immoral.

I respect most religious beliefs (although I certainly don't share them). But I object to this hypocrisy – they're using the rest of us as a shield, loudly proclaiming their virtuousness, while actually taking no risk.

My older brother was one of the last people in America to get polio. He was fortunate; although he was very ill, and had to undergo intensive physical therapy, he didn't suffer any long-term paralysis. But most of his friends at the recuperation center weren't so lucky; they ended up on crutches or in wheelchairs, and some even died. Before the Salk vaccine was introduced in 1955, polio was so common that almost everybody knew a victim. Now, thanks to scientists and to responsible parents, no child in America has to suffer this crippling disease.

While living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I was a personal victim of these Christian zealots: I contracted whooping cough. Most of you have no idea just how awful this is potentially fatal disease is, because it is all but eradicated in the United States, and you've never seen the horrors it can bring. In New Mexico, a group of irresponsible parents refused to have their children immunized. When these kids reached school age, they all were concentrated in a single place (school), where the percentage of unimmunized kids crossed the critical threshold at which herd immunity stops working. And, just as the epidemiologists predict, there was an epidemic of whooping cough among the unimmunized kids. Unfortunately for me and an number of adults in Santa Fe, the whooping cough vaccine only lasts about thirty years, and one day I woke up coughing my lungs out. I always wondered how a cough could kill you; now I know. It was by far the most painful disease I've ever had, for which I can thank a bunch of Christians in New Mexico.