>How?!? It offers a different view of the world, but that hardly qualifies
>if as a religion on those grounds alone. If that were the case, all users
>of psychoactives would be part of a "religion" as well. Do you make that
>claim?
What I mean by world view, is that it is a framework for answering the big
questions asked by all religions, such as: 'how did the world come to
exist?',', 'what exists?', 'how should I act?, etc. It is possible to
take psychoactives and not ponder any of those questions, even though
psychoactives can be used for getting answers to those questions.
>What about the literate vs. the illiterate? By teaching children to read
>are we "converting" them? I fear that your loose use of the term religion
>to cover everything everywhere involving humans renders it completely
>useless. Not all of life is religion.
It is possible that teaching kids to read is like converting them since any
particular language might mold their minds to think in certain ways. My
term religion means an integrated all-encompassing belief system. That's is
what Darwinism is if everything evolves, including our ideas of everything
including evolution, our perception of everything is colored by Darwinism.
Of course you can make a religion of anything, such as baseball, but
baseball can fit into many frameworks.
>>It has all attributes of a
>>religion. For instance, it even has a system of ethics--instead of, say,
>>the 10 commandments, the metameme has "evolutionary stable strategies".
>This is not ethics. An ethical system would need to imply which of the
>*several* "evolutionary stable strategies" that are possible we should
>follow. That judgement is not even hinted at by memetics.
As evolutionary creatures, we naturally want to survive and reproduce.
(Most of us, most of the time.) We don't need to justify that--it's just
how it is. The ethical question is, 'which strategies--which habits of
action including the action of spreading memes to others", work best for
surviving and reproducing?
>Are Coke and Pepsi in a Holy War as well, David?
The way I see it, they're in a symbiotic relationship in which their
competition strengthens both of them--sort of like Mark McGwire and Sammy
Sosa.
--David R.