UNDERSTANDING THE RELIGION MEMEPLEX

Basil Venitis

Meme is a cultural invention that passes from one mind to another and thrives, or declines, like a gene. Memetics explores the concepts and transmission of memes in a similar fashion to genetics.                            A meme's success is due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host.                                                     Memeplex, like the g enetic code, is a set of ideas that reinforce each other. Religion is a memeplex. Religions, scams, and hoaxes succeed because they exploit powerful psychological processes. These processes are the very ones that have enabled humans to survive and create art and technology, but also transform Homo Sapiens into Homo Suckers! Because religions claim divine favor for themselves, over and against other groups, this sense of righteousness leads to violence because conflicting claims to superiority, based on unverifiable appeals to God, cannot be adjudicated objectively. Religions do tremendous harm to society by using violence to promote their goals, in ways that are endorsed and exploited by their leaders. Abrahamic Religions are inherently violent because of an exclusivism that inevitably fosters violence against those that are considered outsiders. Abrahamic legacy is actually genocidal in nature. Spirituality is the search for God, an ultimate reality, a transcendent dimension of the world, an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his being, or the deepest values and meanings by which people live. Spirituality is often experienced as a source of inspiration or orientation in life. It encompasses belief in immaterial realities or experiences of the immanent or transcendent nature of the world. Spirituality is more personalized, less structured, more open to new ideas, and more pluralistic than religion. Spirituality is not related to religion. Spirituality and religion lock horns! Many people define themselves as spiritual but not religious. Spirituals believe in the existence of many different spiritual paths, emphasizing the importance of finding one's own individual path to spirituality. Most people identify themselves as spiritual but not religious. Religion is a memeplex organized by churches, whereas spirituality is defined as an internal individual search. God is a vision of the highest values of truth, justice, love, and goodness toward which we strive. In this sense, God is a standard against which to measure ourselves and our achievements. God reminds us of the relativity and limitations of our own ideas. God serves as a corrective to our biases and a basis for critical reflection. By bringing together our highest ideals in a single symbol, God provides a focus for personal devotion or communal worship. We experience God as love, light, power, and wisdom. The God we pray to is both transcendent and immanent, a part of us but also greater than us. Sometimes we experience God as a light that comes to us in the darkness. This light emanates intense love and compassion and leaves us feeling joyous and connected to all of creation. Other times, we simply hear God's guidance as thoughts. It seems similar to a nudge or sometimes a whisper. This guidance usually comes suddenly and clearly, and it can arrive while we are deep in prayer or simply going about our business of the day. Roger Trigg has identified a trend towards curtailing religious freedom in favor of other social priorities, such as equality and non-discrimination. Religious freedom and the right to manifest religious belief is a central part of every charter of human rights but in recent years there has been a clear trend for courts in Europe and North America to prioritize equality and non-discrimination above religion, placing the right to religious freedom in danger. Trigg is calling for these rights to be balanced. There should not be a hierarchy of rights, but it should be possible to take account of all of them in some way. Reasonable accommodation ought to be the standard. The courts seem to have taken it upon themselves to decide what is and isn't core to belief in a particular religion. Limiting the freedom of religion, courts are limiting human freedom itself, because of the central role played by religion in society. Religion is always vulnerable as it posits a different source of authority from that of the State. No State can be a functioning democracy unless it allows its citizens to manifest their beliefs about what is most important in life.