Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science: Part 5 of 6
How Viral Ideas Hook Us
Did you know that Temple Baptist Church was built on land that sold for 57 cents, the amount saved by a little girl that had been turned away from her Sunday school? Did you hear about the guy who died in his sleep, killed by his own farts? Can you believe that racist jerk Elvis Presley once said: "The only thing a nigger can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." And, guess what -- Scholars at the Smithsonian have found Nostradamus predictions that relate to Barack Obama!
As you may have guessed, the above statements are false. But that hasn't kept them from circulating the internet for years. Each of them is part of a viral email message, which means that each has some quality that makes people forward it, over and over and over.
The first is a kind of message commonly known as "glurge," too-sweet-to-be-true stories that give people a warm feeling or even chills. The second makes us laugh and piques our sense of curiosity. The third plays with our contradictory fascination with celebrities, which includes a desire to tear them down. The fourth appeals to our yearning for magic. These stories all are drawn from the urban legends fact-finding site, Snopes.com. What is the common theme? Emotional arousal.
Comparing religion to chain mail seems crass, but the kinship is real. And as Francis Bacon said, "The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances."
Viral email has a variety of reproductive strategies. Like computer viruses, many chain mail messages contain explicit "copy-me commands." Some promise us good luck if we forward the message to ten people before the day is up -- or a week of happiness, or even prosperity. Some threatens us with bad luck if we don't. Some tries to shame us: "If you care about your friends, you'll send this information about cervical cancer/visa fraud/brown recluse spiders . . ." But most viral emails simply contain something that makes us want to pass them on. They may make us laugh or feel validated and righteous. Many delight us. A few tap our sense of magic or mystery or transcendence.
The term "viral marketing" has itself gone viral recently, popularized by books like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, or Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. Corporations have discovered that their best sales staff are satisfied customers, and they've been experimenting. Can we figure out the formula for starting a fad? Can we seed the virus with a few hired hands who create buzz? The Heath brothers offer communications professionals a simple formula which they call the "Six Principles for SUCCESs:" Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories. Look at the formula. Now think back about what I said regarding the boundaries of supernaturalism and the born again experience. The fit is remarkably tight.
In the field of medicine, epidemiologists study patterns of contagion. They might track, for example, how an influenza virus spread across one region and how it jumped from country to country in the bodies of specific carriers. Based on the way infections fan out, they may even be able to identify the "epicenter" of a disease. Some of the tools of epidemiology are now being applied to study the spread of viral ideas. But whereas diseases spread passively, meaning people rarely try to infect each other, viral ideas, also known as "memes" spread by harnessing the human desire to share what we know and to learn from each other. Memes get transmitted through established social networks. They spread horizontally within a generation, and vertically from generation to generation. That is why specific religions are concentrated in one part of the world or another and children tend to have the same religion as their parents.
For developmental reasons, children are particularly susceptible to simply accepting the ideas of their parents and community. If a parent says stoves burn you, cars can squish you, and bathing keeps you from getting itchy, kids tend to do best if they simply trust what their parents say. Nature has designed children to be "credulous." This allows them to learn from the mistakes of their elders. It makes them more efficient in acquiring valuable information and adapting to cultural norms. It is also why evangelical parents are encouraged to convert their children. Research on identity development shows that if children can be contained within an enveloping religious community through their transition into young adulthood, few will ever leave. Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6)
A successful religion needs to have the qualities of a successful virus. In a changing environment, this means it must have the ability to mutate and adapt. In the past, religions spread largely by edict and conquest. This is how Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and into the Americas. Today, though, religion is perceived as an individual choice and religions must gain share by proselytizing or attracting adherents. For any religion to grow now, it must be something that people are motivated to transmit to each other one on one or in small groups. This is why, today, the religions that are gaining mindshare are those that have strong proselytizing mandates and high birthrates. In the current environment, Christianity has been able to produce offshoots that need no edict or conquest.
Significantly, the religions that are growing right now are ones with strong copy-me commands. Evangelical Christianity is centered on what Christians call the Great Commission: "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost." In addition, just as the Roman church latched onto the strategy of competitive breeding (keep women home, sanctify a high birth rate), so Evangelicals have begun to explicitly add this form of copy-me command to the mix. By contrast, modernist Christianity is more often centered on what Christians call the Great Commandment: "Love the Lord your god with all your heart, soul and mind, and . . . love your neighbor as yourself." In a straight up competition, the copy-me command wins out, and in fact, evangelicals are gaining mindshare, while modernists are losing it.
One of the fastest changing aspects of our world is the growth of information. As knowledge grows, some varieties of Christianity accept new scientific or historical findings and reinterpret their sacred texts and traditions in light of our best understanding of the world around us. Tangentially, this is the approach taken by Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th Dalai Lama has said, "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview." This kind of adaptation is common for forms of Christianity that, like Buddhism, are more centered in praxis (practice) than belief. For those that are centered in belief, adapting to new knowledge is more difficult, and the survival strategy more often is a sort of fundamentalist retrenchment. Karen Armstrong's book, The Battle for God, describes this retrenchment in the Abrahamic religions.
The need to adapt may seem at odds with the recent success of fundamentalism, but in actual fact, fundamentalism is an adaptation to a changing world. Rather than revising dogmas, fundamentalists develop stronger defenses against external threats to a traditional homeostasis. An extreme example of this can be seen in the case of the Amish or Hassidic Jews: the belief system sustains itself relatively unchanged by engaging people to re-create an ancestral environment in which the belief system emerged.
But most theological fundamentalists have a more hybrid approach. They protect their children from external influence by home schooling or parochial schools, but don't mind accessing creationist materials from interactive websites. They expand in-house social services that include pop psychology. They promote hierarchy and sexism but are willing to have women and children as spokespersons for these views. They play up the risks of inquiry and doubt and use scientific findings and follies to make their arguments convincing. Fundamentalist populations resist ideological change, but they have learned to exploit popular culture, best business practices, new technologies, and even scholarship itself to maintain the survival of their beliefs.
Since a virus and host fit together like a lock and key, understanding viral ideas helps us to understand the human mind, and vice versa. Retro-viruses and influenza mutate rapidly, which makes it hard to develop immunizations against them. On the spectrum of religions, Christianity shows a similar flexibility, regularly spinning off new sects, denominations, and even non-denominational renegades. And yet each of these taps a familiar range of emotions and social mechanisms and is constrained by the cognitive structures that place bounds on human supernaturalism. Christianity has adapted to a broad range of human minds and cultures, a strategy that has resulted in success beyond the wildest visions of the patriarchs.
Learn More:
Memetic Lexicon
Richard Brodie - Virus of the Mind
Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick:Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007), 253-257.
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This week on NPR's On The Media, they talked about popular cultural myths that refuse to die. All six segments were interesting.
http://www.onthemedia.org/
Thanks J.F.C.
Check out this thread: Looking for God in all the wrong places.
Very interesting.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-lurie/looking-for-god-in-all-th_b_219087.html?show_comment_id=26690784#comment_26690784
Oh, I forgot the link..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-wilson/evolutionary-psychology-a_b_220545.html
thanks a lot for the reference. Now that I discovered it, all of his posts on huffpo are highly recommendable in my opinion. Somehow he wasn't well enough advertised (for me to stumble upon his posts).
The whole question of group selection that he discusses in a 12 piece series is very important. Also his recommendation to not fight 'microwars' among scientists and freethinkers but to instead make sure that the insights of evolutionary thinking finally get carried out in (and into) the public, where they belong - with the appropriate modesty and caution.
DoA, I use this link to find interesting blogs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-blog/
Hey HS.
I hope I don't get anyone in trouble, but the curtain just slipped and exposed the Great Oz - check out Kimberly Krautter's article on the Sarah Palin page. Scroll down to Ms. Krautter's follow-up comment where she signs off for the night. Wow.
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Aha!! Thanks!
On the topics mentioned here in several comments, Sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, You may all find D.S. WIlson's latest post interesting; he recommends a few references..
I had to split up my post -- please read the longer part before the shorter part.
Or the use of reduplication to convey the meaning "authentic" -- e.g. Are you bring arugula salad or salad-salad? Nowadays, everyone of every age group seems to be using reduplication as a means of forming the meaning "genuine/authentic"-- how did that catch on? Or would you make a distinction between biological evolution and memetic evolution?
in my understanding, there is a difference between memetic evolution and biological evolution (apart from the fact that the former has not fully made it into science yet): memes do not require several generations in order to reproduce whereas genes do.
And in 'historical evolution' I think the term 'evolution' isn't used in the sense of selection at all, but merely in the commonsense meaning of 'that which evolves' - which hardly means more than change of any kind at all.
About natural languages or English in particular I have no special knowledge, but it can certainly be said that the whole history of modern science is full of innovations in which language has been developed that is clearly better suited for cognitive purposes. Almost any kind of established terminology achieves that - or at least purports to.
There really are big jumps in scale and already because the length of typical acts of communication or discussion and debate is so small in comparison to the lifespan required for biological evolution, I think one has to be very careful when applying ideas from natural selection to culture, including religion.
But interestingly, the same restrictions that forbid such simple analogies (and are the reason for the theory of memes) certainly also rule out simplistic applications of darwinist ideas in economy and politics - where they have traditionally left a huge mark.
The innovations of words that express precise ideas is not the kind of example that I had in mind of language being cognitively more fit. Because from the beginning of human language, as far as we can tell, languages can innovate new words that express any concept imaginable. There is not a different way of forming words that has emerged. Or a different syntactic structure that is cognitively fitter or anything like that. In thinking about the cognitive fit between language and thinking or communication, the content of language is independent of the structure that carries the ideas.
It is interesting that you point out how the concept of memes as replicator is intended to (among other things) rule out the simplistic application of Darwinist ideas to economy and politics. M. Midgley actually accuses Dawkins of projecting a Thather-esque take on economics onto evolution. Dawkins explicitly denies this. I don't know enough about this to evaluate their respective claims.
I want to ask Ajita and DofA a question about evolution, but the thread for that part of the discussion has gotten so narrow. Here is my question: do you (or perhaps the concept of meme as non-genetic replicator) make any distinction between "evolution" and "historical development". Because if I think about human language (actually linguistic knowledge-- so language in the mind not as an object in the real world), I can't really say it has evolved past the point where it first emerged (lets assume with Chomsky and contra Pinker that language/narrow syntax emerged at once about 50,000 years ago. I don't think it matters for this point if there was a proto-language or not). If I investigate Old English for example or Sanskrit, as Panini did, I can't detect any cognitively new properties that more modern language has. It is not that Modern English is more fit as a vehicle of communication and/or thought than Old English was. The changes that have taken place of the last at least 10,000 years in languages that we can fairly confidently reconstruct therefore seem like changes, but not evolution in the sense of making language (linguistic knowledge) more fit/fitter than it was earlier. And these historical changes are memetic--just look at how "meme" has replicated itself.
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That is a great question. I wonder, though if one could argue that the changes in language are necessary to maintain a fit with a technological context and cultural context that are evolving (toward greater density, specialization etc.)
One thing I find really interesting is that there is a correlation between biohabitat and linguistic diversity: there is a greater diversity of languages on a number of measures (e.g. typologically, "genetically" in the family relation sense, etc.) where there is a greater biodiversity. E.g. look at the rain forest areas around the world (Indonesian archipelago, the rain forests of Africa, Brazil, etc.) -- those are the regions where there is a very high diversity of languages and they are "complex" in certain ways that e.g. English or Mandarin Chinese are not. English and Mandarin are widely replicated throughout the world and not just as first languages. Perhaps because of this there are certain features that make them easier to acquire: they have very little morphology (the grammatical endings of words that languages like Latin or Finnish are rich in) on their words. Instead of endings, word order tends to convey a lot of the same information in these languages. So perhaps there is some kind of argument that can be made along the lines you suggest. Nonetheless there are certain kinds of memes that seem pretty universal (i.e. independent of cultural context, etc. as fr as I know). The most interesting to me is the reduplication example I mentioned: It wasn't not cold-cold, after all, it is already May. or: I wasn't sick-sick you know. ...
Cross linguistically this seems to be associated with meanings like: genuine/authentic X. So this is a change that seems very wide-spread but independent of culture/bio-diversity, etc.
If I was going to study memes in the field of religion, I would look at the "acquisition of faith." So not just changes across wide expanses of time, but also from one generation to the immediate next generation.
The Lucifer Effect:Understanding How Good People Turn Evil - by Philip G. Zimbardo
http://www.lucifereffect.com/apsrejoinder.htm
When I was looking at the reading list at the end of this article, it reminded me of the book "consciousness: an introduction" by Susan Blackmore. It covers a lot of the ideas that have been discussed in this series. I thought it was really interesting.
I thought about Blackmore's book because I saw the link for a memetic lexicon and one of Blackmore's books (this one co-authored with Dawkins) is "the Meme Machine"
What I have a question about is related to the fact that the link is to a site with the address lucifer.com and I wondered why the site had an address with that name and I found this explanation:
http://www.lucifer.com/lucifer.html
I am really curious what other people reading this article think about the explanation for the site name. I was especially curious what atheists here thought because the statement seems to me highly religious, although not from a Christian point of view. Yet, it is used to celebrate rational thinking and the triumph of reason and humans over God (whom it denies as really existing). It actually does echo some of the memes I see frequently spread by atheists who are ideologically committed to their atheism.
It strikes me as mocking rather than reverential, taking part of the god story and turning it on its head. It also strikes me as a ploy to get you to read it.
What is the religious part? The author explicitly states that he/she does not believe in Lucifer's existence, so what is it that you're claiming he worships? Happiness, knowledge, new experiences, self-responsibility, rationality, and independence?
What is "ideologically committed to their atheism" supposed to mean?
Saying he doesn't believe in Lucifer's existence reminds me a little, in reverse, of (some) mainline Protestantism's saying basically they don't believe in the divinity of Jesus. It is the concepts that Jesus taught instead that they really care about. Here they are saying something like that for Lucifer-- it's the concept of Lucifer that they really admire. Turning the story of God on its head was always part of what the fall of the hubristic angels was about.
I thought that writer pretty clearly worshiped human reason. and mocking god is part of their worship. That is, it struck me as the anti-faith in God.
By ideologically committed to their atheism I mean there are at least two types of atheists I can think of: a type that never really thought deeply about it. They are atheists because they grew up that way. It's what they learned in their families so it seems right to them. Or they had been raised in some faith but then when they grew up they drifted away but for unanalyzed reasons. That is, they never really thought about why they didn't believe, it just seems right to them. There are others who have clear reasons for not believing and have thought out the details of having a world view that revolves highly around their atheism.
They have thought carefully about what they believe and don't believe. Some ideological atheists have even thought about how their language could be used to construct a world view. They wouldn't even use an idiomatic expression like: "Thank God", because they believe it would suggest an identification with believers in God. They should probably stop using the term: "breakfast" too since it sounds so religious. They could say something like: morning meal or early meal. I thought the writer of that essay seemed very dogmatic about his/her world view.
I know very few atheists who would ever articulate their reasons for not believing in the way it was articulated in that essay. Maybe I just haven't talked to very many people about their reasons for not believing.
Atheism is not an ideological commitment. It's seems impossible to get that through the heads of believers. Now stay after class and write that on the blackboard 100 times...lol...
The person who wrote that essay seemed to have brought their atheism to the level of an anti-faith. I think that is very unusual, but I might be wrong.
This is a great article. However, I think it better to conceive of religion as a very successful meme rather than a virus, though it does have some viral characteristics. I don't think we can think of memes outside of the body. Seems we must consider what benefits memes give their hosts. Since human brains evolved over a long period of time in which we behaved just like animals, I would argue we still do, research shows our brains likely take in information and think much the same way we did 100-160 thousand years ago.
Relgious memes appear to serve to bolster social cohesion and more. For example, the Abrahamic religions, as was said in the article, have a self perpetuating mechanism, that of the moral imperative to convert everyone around you, by force if necessary.
Simply put, if you actually believe that non-believers, will go to hell, and you're a good person, you must try to "help" them. This is just one of the many reasons I think these and other religions are a form of cultural imperialism, and quite unethical.
Regardless of all of that, some would argue that religion is an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS). In that, it helps those who believe it, or pretend, through community propogate their genes into the next generation. It also helps when your particular brand of superstition says you should have as many babies as you can, or at least encourages such behavior, much to detriment of those children.
"Simply put, if you actually believe that non-believers, will go to hell, and you're a good person, you must try to "help" them. This is just one of the many reasons I think these and other religions are a form of cultural imperialism, and quite unethical."
Is that you, GodIs?
"Simply put, if you actually believe that non-believers, will go to hell, and you're a good person, you must try to "help" them."
I actually think Anlegett is right on this point.
If a person on a ship falls overboard, don't you feel you must try to save them?
If someone truly believes in heaven & hell, and that the only way to be saved from eternal hell is through their religion, then shouldn't they be trying to convert you?
This is why I think 'fear of a hell' is doubly beneficial to some religions.
1. 'fear of a hell' can be very effective in converting people to certain religions
2. once converted, it provides an incentive (maybe even an obligation) to convert others
That's why, IMO, religions that teach "fire & brimstone" are growing at a faster pace than, what some would call, more moderate religions.
"research shows our brains likely take in information and think much the same way we did 100-160 thousand years ago. "
This is a false statement, no such factual research exists. With that exception, the rest of your piece is eloquently expressed.
Good point about that quote. Given the "great leap forward" in human culture about 50,000 years ago, a number of scientists studying the evolution of humans have suggested that something qualitatively different had happened in humans. Linguists and scientists in related disciplines have suggested what happened was human language emerged or at least something quantitatively different happened to human language-- According to Chomsky the core property that distinguishes human language from the communication systems of non-human primates and other non-human animals is that it is recursive: "John said that Mary thinks that Ersi believes that Sophia asserted that...." And recursive language means recursive thought. So it is likely at this point (the great leap forward) there was an emergence of language with the recursive property. At the point language emerged with this property, the architecture of the mind was necessarily fundamentally altered.
Real Christians are advised to offer Jesus to people unconvinced of their sin.
It is their duty to judge rightly because they are God's representatives. They must remember to be careful to remain true to God's Word, for they are not judging according to their own personal convictions, but simply teaching the Bible. If believers do not judge, they are partly responsible for the sinner's damnation. It is a Christian's obligation to judge!
God is love.
I presume you have been selected by god to determine who "Real Christians" are?
Holy smoke. No wonder I have a flaming case of theophobia.
Let me be polite. The problem is that the scripture has numerous contradictory points of view built into it. Therefore, it can be interpreted in many ways, and justified in many ways.
I actually don't disagree with you about judging. I think if a Christians truly believes that someone is going to burn forever, it is immoral for them to not try to prevent that. What I disagree is your justification. It is not a Christian obligation, but a humane and moral obligation to prevent suffering. It is not about judging, but about helping.
The problem with Christians, like believers of all religions, is that there are always others of your faith who hold contradictory beliefs. These beliefs are also justifiable through rationalization. True morality comes from biology.
GodIs Satire...;-D......At least that's what I choose to "believe"...he, she, is either that or that albino monk from the Davinci Code..lol..
Welcome to Valeries series; always good to read your stuff.
Excellent article, Valerie. Love the differentiation between praxis and belief. However I think there are forms of Buddhism that are belief-based, like in Christianity although not quite as fundamentalist.
The ability of fundamentalist sects to attack science and inquiry while using modern technology and the legitimacy of science to strengthen their argument and maintain power (the hybrid approach) interests me on multiple levels. One level of course, is what you point to here about the nature of viral memes to self-propagate. This is looking at it form the belief's point of view, and understanding how beliefs evolve over cultural landscapes. The other level is from the psychological point of view- I think these belief systems use two psychological properties to maintain this hybrid approach- cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. The most successful religions possess numerous contradictory beliefs that increase the cognitive dissonance in their followers, and the resolution of that dissonance is through confirmation bias where the believers cherry pick a subset of beliefs from their belief system and selectively filter the evidence to support those beliefs. This enables them to hold on to beliefs that are contradictory to the some teachings of their religion, while promoting the religion itself. Other believers of that same religion could be rationalizing different and contradictory beliefs which are still part of that religious structure, only ignoring the other aspects of that religion. Thus we have peaceful Muslims and suicide bombing jihadis, and we have gay ministers and homophobic believers.
very interesting.
The 'productive' (=abusive) use of cognitive dissonance is also among my personal all-time-favorites to explain the 'stickyness' of religious beliefs.
What I recently find even more interesting is the manner in which this method of cognitive dissonance is employed in politics and even in not-so-noble management techniques.
There's something profoundly abysmal in this. I'd love to figure out what it is. But it seems that I am severely handicapped by my rational mode of thinking and discourse in this endeavour...
Funny, isn't it?
Okay. Now I see your point about what you posted below. I will need to think about this.
Yeah, that's a good point. The use of cognitive dissonance combined with confirmation bias is not restricted to religion. I've not looked at it as a technique that systems of belief employ in general. Of course, religion is such a clear case of this phenomenon and I like to understand how religions operate.
I've written about this when analyzing Hinduism, which is a religion that induces an extraordinary amount of cognitive dissonance in individuals and easily resolves this dissonance through confirmation bias. Pretty much any ideological position can be justified when such belief systems use the one-two attack of cognitive dissonance- confirmation bias.
I
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Yes, confirmation bias as a part of dissonance reduction seems like a huge factor here. I like your term cultural landscape --may have to borrow it :).
I'm not sure if I came up with it or if I read it somewhere. I know that the term evolutionary landscape is used by ecologists and evolutionary biologists to symbolize the multi-dimensional nature of the selection pressures in nature, and cultural landscape expresses this same idea when it comes to the evolution of beliefs.
Nice. I like your ideas. The cognitive-dissonance/confirmation-bias combo helps to explain much in a running exchange I have been having with another Huffpo commenter. (And gives me new material to think about.)
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The two ways of growth characteristic for evangelists and buddhism seem very different in nature to me, from an abstract point of view:
while 'competitive breeding' (nice concept :-)) seems naturally limited in scope, adapting the core tenets of faith in a practical mindset has no reason to be so.
As a result, there seems to exist an upper limit as to the possible fraction of the population that will end up being evangelicals, while a mindset that basically exudes mindfulness (or even reason), peace and compassion may very well spread further.
This is not supposed to be a script for a new 'clash of civilizations' or wars of religion. To the contrary, it's a simple extrapolation of the basic properties of the various kinds of spirituality. The world may remain in a fragmented state with various peninsulas of faith (including atheism) or there may exist a way to paint everything in one color on the spiritual map. But since evangelists have experienced severe obstructions in turning even one nation's map into a uniform color, they don't seem to have the power to achieve the same on an even larger scale.
But a form of spirituality which allows itself to adapt (and continually renew itself) may get there.
To be sure, getting there wouldn't be a victory. Rather, it would be the end of religious confrontation as envisaged by enlightenment thought, nothing more.
should read 'evangelical' everywhere instead of 'evangelist'
Any creed that feeds on it's own moral superiority can only spread so far, as it will eventually run out of apostates, heretics, scapegoats....
exactly.
There's probably little that would be more destructive to a worldview based on conceit than the dim prospect that one day there will be nobody else left to blame.
"Research on identity development shows that, if children can be contained within an enveloping religious community through their transition into young adulthood, few will ever leave."
Part 1 - When I was a little kid, my best friend lived two houses down. His family was Baptist. There weren't many Baptists in the town I grew up in (like none). When we got to 5th grade, his parents took him (and his sister) out of public school and sent them to some religious school about 40 miles away. This was to avoid all the sex & drugs in public school. This was a very small town and I knew everybody in my graduating class and most of the people in the class ahead of and behind me. Even in the late 60s & early 70s, 5th graders in that town were not getting high or hooking up. Every day, they commuted to this place, and for the most part, these kids were ostracized. This was when I first realized that this family was peculiar. They became the strangers two doors down and we were no longer friends.
Part 2 - Amusingly, the religious school only went through grade 10, so they were back in public school for 11th & 12th grades (sex & drugs anyone?). He was never really accepted by anyone is high school because he was so different. I remember his parents suspending his driving privileges for a month because he wore athletic shoes to school one day. I also remember his father beating him mercilessly with a belt in their back yard in front of god and everybody (I don’t remember why, but does it matter?).
I've never been to a class reunion, but the invitations always ask if anyone knows his address (although his mother still lives in the same house). I feel certain that he's a religious weirdo to this day. Since I'm gay and an atheist, I know what alienation really feels like, but not to this degree. They were exiles in their own neighborhood. I assume their kids are suffering the same viral fate.
I think it's interesting that alienation can reinforce religion.
this example may very well be among the worst. It seems clear that such cases are driven by a certain calculus of trying-to-make-sense-of-the-pain.
aka the self-reinforcing feedback loop of victimization.
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What a painful story. Especially the thought of them isolating him until he became so odd that he was essentially self-isolating.
Those viral email messages are just like religion and I pay as much attention to them. It doesn't matter how many times you point out that they use lies, people *want* to believe them and they can't seem to help but succumb to the superstitious fear of not forwarding them.
Those type of email messages go into my delete folder immediately. I find it ridiculous to compare them to faith in God. And why on earth would people *want* to believe the ridiculous threats or promises of such messages?
It's probably a safe assumption that nobody reading Valerie's series would seriously compare them to faith - and Valerie's post makes it explicit that the comparison is a daring one.
Certainly you personally should not feel offended by the comparison - and I don't think you are.
None of this is the point.
The point is, in my opinion, that unfortunately there ARE many people who DO believe such ridiculous threats and promises.
Let's up the ante a bit - just to make it a bit more interesting:
would you be willing to defend the faith of evangelicals with more or less verve than a sane muslim would be willing to invest into a defense of the faith of a radical muslim?
I am not saying that there is no sane christianity or no sane islam. I am saying that it is and always has been a mere fact of life that the majority is peaceful. There's little that guarantees it.
OK, then. Let's take any of Valerie's examples. She tells us that all are false. None of them even sounds plausible to me. Why do you think people believe them? I know for a fact that people do believe them. Why do you think they forward them?
I think that people *want* to believe the messages. I have little doubt about that. Their reasons for wanting that vary, but that is irrelevant. They could go to Snopes and investigate, but they'd rather have the reinforcement of what they already believe.
The superstitious part involves forwarding them. Somebody said that, if they don't follow this silly rule, they will be punished with misfortune by (?).
Very religion-like.
BTW - I didn't say that religious people were more susceptible to them than anyone else.
I just said that they are like religion.
Very interesting analysis. How would you explain theophobia-- a condition a few people like myself have who get panic attacks and very ill when in a church? Is it some sort of immunological reaction to the religious meme virus? My psychiatrist didn't help me at all.
is it really that bad? You're missing lots of treasures in terms of art that way.
But then, there's also limits as to how much humans are allowed to see of the inner world of the pyramids without any immunological reactions. :-)
It is no joke. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. There is plenty of art in museums and books without having to go into a church.
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