memeticsConsidering memetics, and Susan Blackmore’s take that memes with altruism built-in, is more successful in spreading, how do you think one could carefully construct a memepool for a greater virality in Atheism?
For those unfamiliar with memetics, a short description follows:
A meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a “culture” in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus.
Afterthought edit: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/powerful_ideas/
Meme? Atheism is a reasoned position in relation to a specific claim, the existence of god. The theistic world view is expressed through are cultural framework and propagated with massive amounts of funding. It is not by advancing atheism that theism will become redundant, it will be by advancing reason, critical thinking and knowledge acquired by credible methods. The question may well be; why are these traits suppressed within our cultural paradigm?
The antibodies are very well established in our society to combat the spread of atheism. I think the only way is to kill the antibodies to make being an atheist more socially acceptable.
It appears to me to be spreading rather quickly. More literature is coming out, more public speakers, more individuals identifying as atheist, even.
For that matter, the religious have begun to directly address us “Atheists” as a group and as a threat, which to me is a huge sign of progress/impact.
First of all, don’t take memetics for granted. That’s a compelling theory but there are many professional detractors, I hear (I’m not a professional, so I can’t comment).
Secondly, why should spread be faster? What is the baseline here? The only other similar mechanism that we know is evolution, and its work is measured in eons, not years. Atheism as a real trend has only been around for a few decades, a century, tops.
Consider how long it takes a mouse colony to evolve skin color matching its background (which only needs a single point mutation!) – a 1000 years, that’s how long.
Human mind is deceptive. Once an idea (existing of soul, god(s), afterlife) stuck to a person, it is really hard to get it out. And one should throw away a lot of ideas away before becoming a skeptic.
From the other point of view, there’re organizations (even governments) that benefits from spreading religion ideas. And, of course, you will get no profit for spreading rational thinking. Only if you’re selling some kind of funny anti-clerical t-shirts or popular-science books, but that doesn’t count.
The analogy of a potentially rational, formalized school of thought (Atheism) to an irrational, viral strain of an idea (photo-bombing) seems weak.
A fairer comparison might be to ask, “why did so many people believe Bill Cosby was dead compared to the number of people who in the same time came to believe that God was dead?” Memetics relies on the satisfaction of our assumptions (or free abandonment of the rules of assumptions); i.e. seeking out a source to confirm something we were ready to believe, or violating the context of a given “cultural unit”. Atheism is not a “unit of cultural information”; it is a school of thought that arose from specific historical contexts.
To make Atheism convincing as a meme it would need to lack context; in stripping its context it would fail to bear any kind of rational weight and would never convince anyone of anything.
If anyone is ‘becoming atheist’ because its a meme they are suddenly affiliating with, like jumping on a bandwagon, they’ve missed the point.
People ought to be an atheist because they have faculties of critical thinking and rational fact analysis, and have come to the conclusion themselves, and subsequently concur with the similar conclusion reached by so many others in similar fasion…
Religion flourishes because regardless of its truth value or otherwise, it provides a source of comfort (albiet a false one) to many people who cannot handle their terror of death, the dark and the unknown in any other way.
The trick is to educate people better, and to help them deal with the realities of life in a healthier way, less reliant on the often damaging psychological crutch of religion.
I think the problem of religion vs atheism is that religion appeals to the human ego. Many religions teach their followers that they belong to the one true religion and all the others are false or defective in some way.
My own experience is mostly with Xtian fundamentalists and Jehovah’s Witnesses in particular. They are very good at reinforcing the idea that they are right and everyone else is wrong. They feel no need to consider any other position since they are always correct and any contradictory evidence can be dismissed.
Atheism has its own appeal but right now that is rather elite and intellectual which average people may find unattractive. As atheism grows to include more members that appeal will likely change.
I think our best approach is to expose the internal inconsistencies and fallacies found in every religion. Atheists are already have deeper knowledge of most religions than the majority of the believers. We can certainly use that to our advantage along with our willingness to question everything.
Vested interest, perhaps? As far as I can tell, nobody is making money or solidifying a power base as a result of atheism so there aren’t the same incentives.
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