Template:Memetics
Memetics
Memetics is the study of information and culture which may be based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution.
Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. It describes how an idea may propagate or replicate successfully through the mental capacity of society.
It has been labelled as pseudoscience by many scholars leaving memetics unable to establish itself for research.
The meme was conceived as a "unit of culture" expressing a pattern of thought and behavior. It may be "hosted" in the mind of one or more individuals, then transferred through the senses from one person into the mind of another.
This allows one individual to influence another through the "memetic" seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. A meme's success may be measured in its effective contribution to its hosts.
Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene" where it was presented as analogous to a gene under a Dawkinsian interpretation.
"Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in a broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain."
This analogy is weak at best and makes a poor comparison. Genes may propagate themselves by zipping together in procreation and becoming something other than either of the orginal sources of the genetic string input while a meme is merely replicated.
Genes composed of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, are a set of instructions that determine what the organism is like and how it behaves in its environment.
It is also true that the same gene may have multiple uses and influence within the body depending upon gene activation. There are transcription factors which may bind to an enhancer and a promoter causing activation or inactivation.
The genome of organism are inscribed in DNA, or in some viruses RNA. I mentioned this because Dawkins also compared memetics to viruses and parasites.
The portion of the genome that codes for a protein or an RNA is referred to as a gene. While some genes do not code for proteins those genes that do are composed of tri-nucleotide units called codons, each coding for a single amino acid.
It is the lack of a code script for memes in Dawkins' analogy where critics of his theory like Dr. Luis Benitez-Bribiesca are led to call memetics "a pseudo-scientific dogma" and even "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution."
Dawkins' analogy of viruses and parasites may confuse the metaphor because they do not always have the same characteristics.
In his 1991 essay "Viruses of the Mind," Dawkins condesindingly describes religious beliefs as "mind-parasites" while believers are referred to as "faith sufferers" or "patients".
Holding religious ideas ideas in contempt he believes in an erroneously narrow view that religious beliefs are "Mind-Parasites" and can infect societies like viruses?
He imagines the religious meme can simply infect minds of an unsuspecting public.
"The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing." Dawkins sees this belief as faith.
Dawkins writes "Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically."
One of the great failures in the study of history has been the mooring of what was intended as metaphors into the harbors of superstition and idolatry. Probably just as dangerous is the mooring of the same picturesque memes to science and the the invisible science of psychology.
Dawkins imagines in an erroneously narrow view that a religious beliefs are "Mind-Parasites".
He goes on to write that, "When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of people all over the world." Is a meme like a virus? What is a virus and is it actually a parasite?
A virus by its nature is not 'fertile'. It is only replicated in and by a cell that allows it into it.
While a virus does not truly qualify as a living unit for several reasons including its inability to reproduce itself it is a fact that many parasites are capable of reproduction and fully qualify as living things.
What kind of virus and parasite is a meme like and what are the actual elements of a meme we should be concerned with?
The smallpox variola virus and poliomyelitis viruses, are both 'obligate parasites' because they lack the metabolic machinery to generate energy or to synthesize proteins. So they depend on host cells entirely to carry out these vital functions. Does the host cell simply social distance or shield itself from offensive memes or can there be a natural immunity to the detrimental effect of its toxicity?
Since, viruses are nothing more than exosomes can we learn more about the meme threat by carrying the analogue out farther?
The human body replicates exosomes by the millions regularly which provides for the proper protection and function of a healthy body and immunities.
Memes can be an essential part of the life of society for 'the proper protection and function of a healthy society'.
The God Delusion
In The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins he states:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to 'come out,' thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can't be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Dawkins holds that postmodernism uses obscurantist language to hide its lack of meaningful content but may be guilty of the same. Because of his acceptance of dogmatic claims of religionists who permeate the text and the sophistry of the false prophets predicted in scripture itself. The revealed text must passes through ages so that scripture and the truth within it is only revealed to the ones are willing to see and heat that same spirit of revelation which wrote it.
“Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder’, you reveal yourself as an immoral person, ‘and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you’.”
“If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.”
“If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents.”
“Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Coming to terms
While Dawkins held religious ideas in such contempt he believed they can infect societies like viruses but he failed to understand two things. Naturally created immunity and the true meaning of religion.
Religion as a term from the Greek word 'threskia' is not what a 'believer thinks' about 'life after death' nor the 'nature of God'.
Religion was by definition what society did specifically to care and provide for the cares of the needy of society.
What society does and how they do it may be influenced by what the individual thinks just as what they think can be influenced by what they see, reason, or imagine to be true.
Dawkins believes there is no God. If religion was what you thing about God his religion would be atheism and he was clearly a zealot.
If we are nothing more than biological biproducts of evolution with no soul dwelling in our minds nor spirit residing our bodies further discussion would seem meaningless.
But is it or is there a rational to the 'pure religion' of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.
All of them created and taught social welfare systems based on charity and the free choice of the individuals called liberty.
Any system that depends upon force, men who call themselves benefactors but exercise authority one over the other, or that compels the offerings of the people and borrows against the future to provide bebefits today ... will not long be free.
If there is a God of nature, a divine intelligence bebind the creation of life in this world it is in the character of that God to give life out of love. If we are made to live in the image of that Divine essence or spirit we should be able and willing to reason that to give life to one another through a similar love and charity is the only reasonable principle by which to live. How could anyone imagine that they will remain free as a people if they are willing to take that choice away from their fellow man.
While we may not be able to prove to any scientist that such ghostly or etherical elements are present beyond their measured existence, neither can they prove the spirit and soul does not exist within a reality beyond the reach of their finite perception.
About 200 years ago when almost every institution of welfare in America was still provided by charity Religion was defined as the “Real piety in practice, consisting in the performance of all known duties to God and our fellow men”.
What is your duty to your fellow man?
Religion was and is how you care for the "widows, orphans" and needy of society who may be unable to care for themselves.
We gave a choice to either do it by charity through a daily administration of love or you do it by force through men who call themselves "benefactors" but "exercise authority one over the other."
The former are those who believe in a an invisible God of love bestowing liberty and choice through the spirit of love upon those who love him.
The latter is the atheist who reasons there is no God of creation that has endiwed man with the right to choose. He or she will find themself believing in the gods many of a temporal society who makes choices for the individual.
We should be able to reason with Archibald MacLeish who said, "Freedom is the Right to Choose, the Right to create for oneself the alternatives of Choice. Without the possibility of Choice, and the exercise of Choice, a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.”
Redistribution of that which is produced by the sweat, blood and life of the individual by anyone other than themselves will require force and diminishes freedom which degenerates the souls of men according to reasonable men like Polybius.
If you go the covetous way of the gods of an empowered government Peter says you will become "merchandise", "curse children", become both a "surety" for debt and entangled again in the "yoke of bondage".
Those who have read the Bible in search of truth can see that if in the bondage of Egypt we had to give 20% of our labor to the government for free in the hope of receiving the welfare dole of that government's free bread in hard times then those who pray for the welfare of the modern socialist state are again entangled in that ancient yoke of bondage.
According to rational men like Plutarch the evidence has been well demonstrated throughout history that “The real destroyers of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations, and benefits.” And "That the man who first ruined the Roman people twas he who first gave them treats and gratuities."
What has brought society to it's present state of conflict and turmoil is not the governments of the world nor the gods of their imagination but the sloth, avarice, and wantonness of the people.
Those with an appetite for entitlements and that habit of receiving those benefits by institutions of force will become so accustomed to living at the expense of others and dependent for their livelihood on the property of others that they will be oblivious to the fact that they have already begun the process of degenerating into Polybius' perfect savages.
In their pride and covetousness they will readily express their contempt for those who even suggest that there is a spiritual God of love and charity to whom we should conform.
They will be compelled by the arrogance of their own faith that there is no God to hold such living souls in contempt as delusional and with the fallacy of the ad hominem declare them mentally ill and themselves as the sane doctor with the right to judge the conscience of others as disease.
"The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'."
Dawkins in his ignorance or prideful denial of the evidence guven by the reasonable men of history goes on to say his, "Patients typically make a positive virtue of faith's being strong and unshakable, in spite of not being based upon evidence."
Because he goes on to state that, "Indeed, they may fell that the less evidence there is, the more virtuous the belief." We can assume he lacks understanding of the term faith. In Greek, the root word from which we get 'faith' is from the noun is PISTIS, while the word 'believe' is from the verb is PISTUEO.
Faith in the way of charity rather than the way of force may be reasonable and evidenced by history but it is a conviction of the soul and mind because they are convicted by a separate spirit in their heart and mind.
Because Dawkins fails to identify the true definitions of religion and faith he writes "The sufferer may find himself behaving intolerantly towards vectors of rival faiths, in extreme cases even killing them or advocating their deaths."
Because of his strong delusion he subsequently fails to make the true distinction between the only two religious rivals, private welfare by charity and public welfare by force.
There are certainly countless denominations that profess the religion of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus but if they are engaged in covetous practices or eating at the table of men who exercise authority then they are workers of iniquity and in need if repentance.
The simplicity of living by this faith, hope, and charity taught by Jesus, the Apostles, and all the prophets rather than the force, fear, and fealty promoted by Cain, Nimrod, Pharaoh, Balaam, Caesar, Marx, FDR , Stalin, and Dawkins which has become so dominant in the systems of the world today. These two fundamental distinctions divide all religions into two basic groups. These are the only two true rivals of faiths.
There can be no rival faiths among those who follow the way of hope through love and charity for they also walk in forgiveness by default.