Is Christianity Dying? Miley Cyrus Gets a New Tattoo

Miley Cyrus got a new tattoo ... and not just some dumb decoration. This is a pro-gay tattoo! It's actually pretty amusing, an equal-sign "=" on her middle finger. (Think, "give 'em the bird"). It might seem ambiguous except that she tweeted "All LOVE is equal!"

This might seem like just another amusing story about a young starlet, but it shows yet again why Christianity is dying a slow death in America.

Homosexuality and LGBT rights have become the Achilles tendon of conservative Christianity. The out-of-the-closet movement that started in the 1970s has worked: virtually all teens and young adults have

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 Bell, like most thoughtful Christians, rejects the outdated eternal-torture idea of Hell.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

Best of Religion Virus: Mardi Gras Riot!

Dear Faithful Readers ... you may have noticed that my posts have been more sparse than normal. A couple weeks ago I was alarmed to discover that I'm approaching my 500th blog. I was actually amazed by this. I just sit down a few times a week and offer my thoughts, and it never occurred to me that I'd written so much!

Just for fun, I started looking back through my old blogs, and was sort of surprised to find that I really enjoyed reading some of them. I'm not bragging or anything, but I do believe that you can't be a really good writer unless you get pleasure from your own work. Self-congratulations aside, I realized that there are some real gems in my old blogs, but they're buried in a huge pile of less-than-stellar blogs that will fade into well-deserved obscurity in the dustbins of the internet. It would be a shame to lose the good ones along with the rest.

So I decided to put together a new Kindle e-book, a "Best of Religion Virus." It's nothing you couldn't get if you had the patience

Big Stink over Malawi Farting Ban ... a racist meme?

An amusing story has been making the rounds: Malawi is banning public farting!

I have to confess that I fell for this story when I first saw it. But then I thought, "Wait a second ... you're supposed to be the meme expert. Are you falling for this without even a little skepticism?" This Malawi farting-ban story has all the earmarks of a classic viral meme. I suspected there was more myth than truth in this amusing story.

And I was right: it's just an amusing myth that grew out of a twisted version of the truth. But the success of the "Malawi farting-ban meme" turns out to have some interesting racist overtones.

I don't know about you, but I didn't even know exactly where Malawi is. I had to look it up – it's in southeast Africa.

Just a couple mouse-clicks revealed the true story, which is far less interesting than the farting-ban meme. The real story (from the BBC) is that Malawi is trying to curb air pollution. The language of the bill reads:

The Religion Virus gets Cred: The First Real Attack!

The worst insult one can get is to be ignored. When they can't ignore you any more, it's time to celebrate!

A few weeks back, Dr. R. Joseph Hoffmann, who teaches at the New England Conservatory in Boston, published a scathing "review" of both my book and The God Virus by Darrell Ray. I was excited ... perhaps this would be a chance to face a real opponent, one with a doctoral degree in philosophy and several books to his name!

Sadly, I was disappointed. It was a complete hack job, unworthy of such a well-educated opponent.

Hoffmann starts out with a cutesy poem, followed by three or four wandering paragraphs that question Dr. Ray's education as well as mine. Nothing like an irrelevant ad hominem attack to set the tone. Throw mud on the messenger; maybe it will stick to the message. (Just to set the record straight, I'm not a systems engineer; that's some other guy with the same name, and

Why Does Atheism Exist?

Why do atheists exist?

This may sound like an odd question to regular readers of this column, and there are many good answers. But in this case it's actually an interesting question because it came from one of my readers (I'll call her O.P. for privacy) who felt that my book, The Religion Virus, didn't answer this question.

O.P. is on board with the basic premise of my book, that people believe ideas (memes) that they want to believe, often with little regard for the veracity of the ideas. And the ideas that they like the most are far more likely to spread, to be passed on to other people.

As religion evolved, changed and spread across societies and down through history, the ideas that were the most appealing (either because they were the most attractive or the most frightening) were the ones most likely to gain adherents. Religion became a constantly-changing thing, shaped and improved each time it was retold. It became more and more "infectious" because that's what evolution does. At each generation, the "stickiest" ideas are the ones that are retold. After a thousand or two years the religion memes that survived in this "survival of the fittest" battle became very tenacious. These religious memes have become incredibly appealing.

(This is a pretty terse summary of the foundation of my book – I hope readers who aren't familiar with memetics will enjoy my book or any one of a half-dozen others that do an excellent job presenting the concept of memetic evolution, how ideas evolve as they move across society and down through history.)

So how does atheism survive? Given that it has no dogma, no Bible, very little literature, and few organized congregations bent on spreading it, why are there so many atheists? How do atheism memes propagate themselves?

The answer is that atheism doesn't survive. It's like asking, "What's in a hole?" There's nothing in a hole. It's only a hole as long as nobody fills it with something. The word "hole" describes the lack of content.

Scientific Study: Misinformed People Become MORE Certain When Presented With Facts

Every scientist and atheist has run into this: You're having a discussion with a religious person who holds beliefs that are simply wrong, and you have solid facts that show that they're wrong. Maybe it's about obvious conflicts in the Bible like Genesis 1 versus Genesis 2, or how the various versions of the Easter story can't be reconciled, or why creationism can't possibly be right. You carefully and politely show them the facts ... and they become more entrenched in their position, not less.

Why is that? It's baffling!

Now a scientific study reported on National Public Radio confirms it. This isn't our imaginations, it's real. People really do actively resist the truth.

Take the case of Jan Brewer (governor of Arizona) who claimed that border-patrol agents had found beheaded bodies in the Arizona desert. It turned out her claim was a gross exaggeration – most of the border violence is on the Mexican side of the fence. But she started a myth, and people believed her. Nothing new there.

But here's where it goes off the tracks: when presented with evidence showing that the governor was wrong, people who believed her didn't change their minds. In fact, they actually believed the falsehood more! Instead of changing their minds, they concocted theories that there was a government conspiracy to fool us, to cover up the true level of violence along the border. The truth is that undocumented Mexicans are, on the whole, one of the most law-abiding groups in America, and there has never been a single case of a beheaded body found in the Arizona desert.

Somewhere down inside me I've always understood that people's ideas are entrenched. I even wrote a whole chapter of The Religion Virus about why this is biologically important: it helps our survival if we can pass information from one generation to the next with high fidelity. Children are biologically programmed to learn, and then as teenagers they're programmed to "freeze" their knowledge so that when their parents die, the information will be safe until they can pass it along to their children.

But this study goes one step farther. Apparently memes (the ideas that reside in our brains) are not only entrenched, but they're actively resistant to change. They defend themselves. They build counter-arguments when threatened.

It's frustrating, but the old adage "Know your enemy" comes to mind. If we assume that logic and facts will prevail against faith and falsehoods, then we don't understand our enemy. The enemy is irrationality and myths, and it's the human mind itself. The human mind is apparently programmed to resist change.

We can argue all we like with adults, but the real battle has to be fought in our schools. Early education is the key. Human beings have to be shown how to think rationally and be taught true science and history while young. By the time we're adults its often too late.

Aquatic Apes and Mormonism

One of the most fascinating proposals in anthropology is called the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, the idea that at some point in the evolution of homo sapiens our ancestors spent a great deal of time in the water. The theory makes a certain amount of sense, and would explain our hairlessness and the fact that human children, unlike all other great apes, love to play in the water. Just go for a walk on the beach, as I do two or three times each week, and it's striking to see kids running into the water chased by parents trying to keep them from drowning. No other primate species does this; they're all instinctively averse to swimming.

This Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (AAH) hasn't been embraced by the anthropology community, but it's not down and out either.

Either way, it illustrates one of the big differences between religion and science. In science, when there's an outlandish hypothesis (that is, outlandish compared to the accepted science), the advocates of that hypothesis are expected to provide extraordinary evidence to support their claims. It's not sufficient for them to just say, "It could be true, you can't prove it's not." The strength of a hypothesis rests on its explanatory power and on direct evidence that supports it.

The AAH has a great deal of explanatory power, but little direct evidence to support it. For example, if archaeologists discovered human remains by a sea shore with great piles of sea-urchin shells and other marine species that could only be gathered by swimming and diving, that would be strong direct evidence. Lacking such direct evidence, the proponents of the AAH can only offer indirect evidence, such as the fact that we're mostly hairless, we're good swimmers, and we love water even as babies.

The debate about AAH started in earnest in the 1960's and has continued ever since, but it's fair to say that AAH proponents have not met the standard of providing unusually strong evidence for their "outlandish" theory. Even Dawkins chimed in to say that the theory deserves some respect, but the mainstream anthropology community isn't convinced.

What does this have to do with religion? Well, I was really frustrated this week by a long and convoluted discussion in the comments section of my blog, a quasi-debate between me and several other atheists versus several Mormons. I say "quasi-debate" because it quickly devolved into mild-to-medium strength insults and a lot of smoke and mirrors, with little real substance.

Evolution Predicts: Benedict Will Dig Catholic Church's Grave

The Roman Catholic Church is falling victim to one of the best-understood aspects of Darwin's evolution – sexual selection. They're becoming a self-perpetuating failure.

Sexual selection is one of the most interesting and weird aspects of evolution. I'll explain using an example. Suppose some women, due to random genetic variations, just happen to like men with unusually large noses. Who will they marry? Probably men with large noses. Now think about the children of these unions: They'll inherit the large noses from their fathers, and they'll inherit their mother's fondness for large-nosed men. So at the next generation, and on down through their descendants, men with small noses won't have very good luck, and men with larger and larger noses will be favored.

We see this all the time in nature. The tailfeathers of peacocks and birds of paradise, the huge antlers of moose and the elaborate dances of fruit flies are all excellent examples. We even find it in ourselves. For example, a woman's shapely figure is purely "for show." Other great apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas have no trouble producing milk without large breasts. And we men have genitals that are something like four times the size, relative to our body mass, of the other great apes. It's purely for show, and has nothing to do with our ability to have sex. The other apes do it with much smaller "equipment."

What does this have to do with the Roman Catholic Church? Everything.

Speaking April 18 in San Diego

Hey, faithful subscribers, are you in Southern California? I've been invited to speak this Sunday at the Humanist Association of San Diego at 6:00 PM. Here are the details (or click here for their announcement):

April 18, 2010
Sunday
6:00 pm
Joyce Beers Uptown Community Center

1220 Cleveland Ave.
3900 Vermont Street
San Diego, CA 92103
619-646-2191The Joyce Beers Community Center

Potluck. Bring a dish to share if you like.

I hope to see you there!

The Religion Virus is Finally Available!

Dear Faithful Readers,

The longest wait of an author's lifetime starts the day the last period is typed at the end of the final chapter. For me, it's been over two long years ... finding an agent, getting a publisher, then almost a full year waiting through the trade-show, marketing, sales, book design and printing cycle.

And now it's here! The Religion Virus is now for sale through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other locations, or you can order it through your local bookstore if they don't carry it. Click Here to learn more.

I'm very excited today. It's been a lot of work, but I think we have a message that's important, one that may nudge us one more step towards a more rational, healthy society and world. If you've enjoyed my blogs, I hope you'll consider buying my book, and pass the word to your friends.

Best wishes to all of you, and thanks for reading! We're just getting started!

Woman Preacher Gets Southern Baptist Church Expelled

It's hard to believe in these modern times that there is still overt, legal discrimination against women. But leave it to religion to be in the dark ages when everyone else has seen the light. The Druid Hills Baptist Church, a thriving Southern Baptist congregation in Atlanta, Georgia, has been declared "not a cooperating church" because its associate pastor is a woman (*gasp*!).

The official policy of the Southern Baptist Convention is that the role of pastor is "limited to men as qualified by Scripture."

Yeah, that's the right idea! Let's take the morals of a bunch of farmers, goatherds and rabbis who lived two thousand years ago, and decide that by golly, they got it right!

Mormons and Animals: Denying our Deepest Instincts

A Mormon reader name Seth yesterday reminded me of one of the things I hate the most about religion: That it denies our animal nature. WE ARE ANIMALS, with very strong instincts, and our instincts dictate most of our behavior. Yet religious people, who believe God created us separately from animals, deny this, and this denial is the root of the monstrous guilt meme that is still infecting most of humanity.

Seth, who responded to this blog, was writing about homosexuality. He's apparently a Mormon, and claimed that even though homosexuality has a genetic origin, gays still have the choice of whether to act on their desires or not. In other words, if a man isn't attracted to women, he can choose to be celibate (to live without love and companionship). Seth wrote, "The very idea that mere genetics takes away a person's freedom of choice in life is one of the sickest and most dehumanizing ideas I've ever heard."

Seth is wrong, dead wrong, cruelly wrong.

Christianity will Save America, and Other Absurd Memes

Yesterday an anonymous reader left a comment that so intrigued me I can't let it pass:

"Interesting that Christianity is in decline in America at the same time that in many other ways the nation as a whole is in decline. On the other hand, Christianity is on the rise in China, Africa and other parts of the world. The decline of religion in America, which atheists take as hopeful, is really just another foundation stone crumbling before the whole building comes down."

Do Christians really believe this?  Apparently so. Which means it's our duty to deconstruct the argument.  Anon's claim just doesn't match the facts.  But it's also a cool illustration of memetic evolution, and how an idea that gets out of its ecosphere dies a sudden death.

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.

The Shroud of Turin: The Zombie that Won't Die

The Shroud of Turin received another death blow today, but it's like a zombie that refuses to die!

(I wrote about the shroud once before.)

I understand and respect many religious beliefs. But how can people believe so many things that can't possibly be true? That have been thoroughly debunked? And perhaps even more perplexing to me, why do they so badly need to believe these myths?

These are the very questions that intrigued me years ago when I began studying memes, memetics, and cultural evolution, and that ultimately inspired me to write The Religion Virus.

Religious beliefs can be broadly categorized on a scale from sensible to outrageous. At the sensible end are beliefs that, while I don't share them, I can understand. Questions of the origin of the universe, the nature of the human spirit or "soul," the source of creativity and inspiration – these things are all interesting questions, and I respect those who explore them from a spiritual/religious point of view.

At the other end of the spectrum are things like creationism, homeopathy, Pat Robertson claiming that a hurricane is God's wrath for homosexuality ... and today's topic, the Shroud of Turin. These things are so ludicrous they defy all logic.

And that's where the study of cultural evolution and memes helps me. Every one of the outrageous claims are things that people, for one reason or another, desperately need to believe. Let me emphasize that word, need, because that is what gives us insight into these impossible beliefs.

Evolution favors survival, period. It doesn't matter whether the species is a noble lion or a lowly tapeworm, the individuals that reproduce faster, that survive the challenges better, are the ones that succeed.

In cultural evolution, truth can be nearly irrelevant to survival. An idea propagates through society based not simply on its truth, but on a host of complex factors, including how fascinating it is, whether it purports to explain something mysterious, and whether people want to believe it.

The problem with truth is that it's only one of many factors that affect an idea's survival. Worse, if an idea's truth or falseness is complex, difficult to ascertain, or worst of all, requires an advanced college education to understand, then truth becomes almost irrelevant in the "survival of the fittest" battle of ideas in society.

The Shroud of Turin is a perfect example of a meme that survives. People want to believe it, because if it's true, it means they can be physically close to an artifact that Jesus Christ Himself touched. And people are able to believe it, because the proof that it's a modern forgery uses complex scientific data. Those not versed in chemistry and physics are forced to simply trust scientists, and have trouble distingishing real science from pseudo science.

So, the zombie meme that won't die, known as the Shroud of Turin, has survived another death blow, and I predict it will survive many more.

Christian Rock and Roll: Memetic Evolution in Action

Here is another example of religion shooting itself in the foot. As one who studies religion as an evolutionary phenomenon, this one is fascinating, because it shows a branch of the "tree of descent" of religious factions that will likely go extinct due to being poorly adapted to the modern "ecology." Simply put, they're going extinct because they're losing the battle-of-the-fittest for survival.

A couple weeks ago, Tyler Frost was suspended from his Christian high school for the horrifying sin of attending his girlfriend's prom, where there would be (gasp) rock and roll music. The school's principal Tim England said "When the school committee ... set up the policy regarding dancing, I am confident that they had the principle of fleeing lustful situations in mind ...should a Christian place themselves at an event where young ladies will have low-cut dresses and be dancing in them."

Today, another news article caught my eye. What would Mr. England think of the Christian Rock Festival going on here in San Diego this weekend? This is a family-oriented event, yet ... they're playing rock and roll, teens are dancing, the girls are screaming when their favorite rock stars come on, and worst of all, it's a beautiful, sunny Memorial Day weekend here in San Diego, and you can just drive past the fairgrounds and see plenty of pretty teen girls in sexy shorts and tank tops, very attractive indeed. And you know those teen boys are going to be dancing with the girls, staring at their cleavage and their rear ends, and lusting, as teen boys do everywhere.

As a cultural evolutionist, one who studies culture, and religion in particular, using methods similar to Darwin's principles of evolution, this is a classic case study of evolution in action. On the one hand, you have Principal England's oppressive policies that alienate teens, who are pretty much hormone driven, not to mention that they are instinctively rebelling against parental authority, trying to establish their own adult identities. It's very easy for an adult to become the laughing-stock of the teenage crowd, which is exactly what Mr. England did with his puritanical, sanctimonious declarations about low-cut dresses, dancing, and rock music.

On the other hand, you have a group of Christians who recognize teens' love for rock music, for dancing, and for live concerts by the beach in the hot Southern California sunshine. Instead of pious prohibitions, this group embraces the kids' natural desires, and channels it into a healthy, family-oriented weekend of great music, hot dogs, carnival rides, dancing, and fun.

Which of these two philosophies, Principal England's, or the Christian Music Fair organizers', is more likely to become extinct in the next 100 years? This is evolution, memetic evolution, in action, and it sure is fun to watch.

Is Evolution only for Smart People?

To Evolutionists, the tenacity of Creationism is baffling: Why do people continue to believe ideas that are thousands of years old, at best unsupported by any facts, and at worst plainly wrong? And as a corollary, why is education (especially in science) inversely correlated with religious beliefs?

Is it possible that only smart people can understand evolution? Is the problem simply that Evolution Science is too complex, too intricate, for a person with an average education to understand? (This is one of those unpleasant questions that you may secretly wonder about, but not want say out loud, for fear of being labeled an elitist.)

Happily, the answer is "No!" And the insight that shows why, ironically, comes from evolution itself: Memetic evolution.

Religion is a highly-evolved memeplex, one that is perfectly tuned to the human psyche. Religion memes appeal to our deepest emotions: fear (hell), hope (heaven and the afterlife), egotism and xenophobia (we're special in God's eyes), and our desire for love (God/Jesus the father). The religion memeplex has been evolving for many thousands of years; at any particular point in history, dozens and hundreds of religions, each with uncountable minor "mutations" (different opinions, interpretations, and misunderstandings) have been competing for survival. The ones that survived are the best of the best.

By contrast, we evolutionists are just children, babes in the woods, compared to our Creationist counterparts. Darwin's ideas, and the memeplex we call the "Theory of Evolution," have only been around for 150 years, a mere eyeblink compared to religion.

And worse, the Evolution Science memeplex evolved in a scientific ecosphere. The memeplex that we call the "Theory of Evolution" spread because it appealed to scientists, who are trained in logical, deductive thinking. Scientists are trained to ignore their emotions, and only accept theories that are based on observable facts and logical deductions from those facts.

Unfortunately, human emotions are far more powerful and persuasive than human logic.

A polar bear is well suited to the Arctic, and a camel to the desert; neither can travel to the other's part of the world and live for long. Each is adapted to the ecology in which its species evolved. If the Evolution Science memeplex is going to spread outside of its evolutionary niche, it too will have to evolve, to be better suited to the needs of non scientists. It will have to develop memes that appeal to human emotions and desires, rather than merely to logic.

To those of us who study culture and history from a Darwinistic perspective, that is, using memes, there is no mystery at all. The answer to our question – Is evolution only for smart people? – is in the memes. It's not evolution itself that is only for smart people, it's just the current memeplex, the one that evolved in an "ecosphere of smart people."

If the Evolution Memeplex is ever going to truly competative with Creationism, it has to evolve.

Tags: evolution memes memeplex darwin science intelligence religion ecosphere ideosphere science scientists

How Many Died from Religion's Opposition to Stem Cell Research?

European news is carrying a wonderful story about the first woman to receive a new organ made from her own stem cells. The woman's bronchus (part of her windpipe/trachea) was destroyed by tuberculosis, and without the transplant, doctors would have had to remove her lung entirely.

Our scientist colleagues in the UK deserve our congratulations for this wonderful achievement &ndash Well done! – but it also reminds us Americans of yet another sad example of religion impeding scientific progress.

Anti-abortionists brought stem-cell research in the United States to a virtual halt. Who knows what lifesaving discoveries might have been made in the last decade? Who knows what crippling diseases, painful disabilities, disfiguring conditions, and dementia that robs us of our loved ones, might have been cured?

Religion has, once again, shown that it is the enemy of science, knowledge, and progress. The religious zealots (a minority, by the way) whose disproportionate political power forced this policy on America, directly caused thousands of deaths, and many times that many people to live in misery, of people who might have been cured, if stem-cell research hadn't been stopped.

Why does it have to be this way? Why is religion so consistently the enemy of knowledge and progress?

The answer is plain when you view religion from an evolutionary, memetic viewpoint. Education and science are not the friends of religion, especially dogmatic religions that cling to ancient ideas. Science has a way of undermining religious scriptures, of proving that biblical "facts" are in fact wrong.

Religion memeplexes always evolve toward survivors, the "fittest" ideas, and the memes that encapsulate anti-science and anti-rationalism ideas are very beneficial to the religious memeplexes. They keep believers from learning the facts and logic that would undermine the foundations of these dogmatic religions.

So, while we can lament the unconscionable setbacks that religion has caused, in this case by delaying medical progress, we shouldn't be surprised. A memetic point of view actually predicts that this will always be the way religious memeplexes – and the people who believe them – will respond to science and rational thought.

Tags: abortion christian christianity memeplex memes organ transplant religion science stem cell

Most Atheists are RIGHT: Religion really does cause violence

Having spent two blogs (part 1, part 2) explaining why religion doesn't cause violence, it's time to refute that statement.

More exactly, I'm going to refine it: Religion isn't at the root of violence (evolution is), but religion greatly amplifies violence.

A huge portion of the "laws" laid down in the Bible are, by today's standards, barbaric and primitive. If a priest's daughter becomes a prostitute, the Bible says she should be burned at the stake (Leviticus 21:9). The penalty for blasphemy is death (Leviticus 23:10-24). Adultery, incest, and homosexuality, any of these and more call for the death penalty, often by stoning.

Even people who claim to follow the Bible's laws, and believe the Bible's inerrancy, can't stomach these laws today. We've evolved, we now know better, but the Bible is frozen in time.

Should we accept these millenia-old rules as our laws, just because two thousand years ago, a group of Jewish scholars declared that these were God's own words?

My primary thesis is not wrong, quite the contrary: Violence is part of our genetic makeup (our instincts), and religious memes that support violence are just an example of memetic evolution at work, shaping the religious memeplex to fit well into its environment (our brains).

But we're supposed to be civilized. We're supposed to move beyond our primitive animal instincts that make us fight and kill one another. We've evolved brains that are powerful enough to understand good and evil. We've evolved culture, and empathy, and the concepts of right and wrong. We understand that sometimes the individual has to subjugate his/her own raw desires for the good of the family, the village, or the world.

Unfortunately, some religions are holding us back from these achievements.

Somewhere along the way, a bunch of parables, historical "tall tales," and good advice, got converted into the inerrant Word of God, purportedly correct in every respect and for all time. The Inerrancy Meme, one of the evolved tricks that religion uses to defend itself from criticism, arose in the Jewish culture a few hundred years before the time of Christ. Since then, it's become a huge barrier to progress in human ethics: If we left it to religions that follow the Inerrance Meme, human ethical advancement would be frozen in time forever.

Religion is not the root of violence and war; that distinction goes to evolution, keeping us in keen competition with one another for survival of the fittest. But religion is holding us back, exacerbating and amplifying the worst parts of our animal nature, and preventing us from evolving to the next level of ethical achievement.

Tags: atheism atheist religion morals ethics evolution memes virus christian jew memes memeplex dawkin harris hitchens