Why would that upset you?
>If religions didn't have some element of benefit to the human race, why
>would they persist as memes for so long?
Because viruses of the mind exist for their own benefit.
>>If a new religion is designed around the premise of continuously integrating
>>better (more accurate, more useful) concepts while ensuring the survival of
>>its believers, it could conceivably achieve true immortality.
>
>What, do you mean until the sun goes red giant, or all the way, until
>everything decays to radiation?
The latter. Hopefully we (humans and their descendants) will settle
other planets before our sun dies.
>Another thing about established religions: they're continuously integrating
>better (more accurate, more useful) concepts, like eg Catholicism accepting
>the idea that the Earth moves round the sun, and other scientific concepts.
I wouldn't call the Catholic church very progressive when it comes to
adapting to new ideas. It took them over 300 years to admit Galileo was
right after all.
>No belief system remains static, surely? I rewire as a personality, as far
Some do. But they don't survive.
>AH: You're using "promise of immortality" memes as hooks.
Of course. Join us or die! (literally :-)
>>Everything is a system. All systems (except perhaps quarks) are composed of
>Lovely. I love this idea. And I love feeling really cheeky as I sometimes
>think "nah, I bet there are systems from which quarks are an emergent
>metasystem".
True. It could be possible that for every "elementary particle" we find,
we will discover that it is actually a system of something even smaller.
Recently I found a page on the web about "zero point fields" (ZPF) or
something like that which claimed that the idea that matter is really
nothing but information has a real theoretical basis. Unfortunately I
lost the URL before I could finish it. Has anyone else come across it?
-- David McFadzean david@lucifer.com Memetic Engineer http://www.lucifer.com/~david/ Church of Virus http://www.lucifer.com/virus/