Religion as Cultural Meme

[Rathpig]

A rather silly thread in the "Non-Christian Religions" sub-forum contains the following point made by QED to which I responded with my extrapolation of the idea (which I have edited and expanded). Since this is a fairly serious topic buried in a rather non-serious thread, I thought I would bring it out into the "Doctrine" forum to see how it fairs.

Of course some people know this as the transmission of memes. It's probably the main reason that the various Abrahamic religions are so dominant.

The invention of a damnation meme allows the priest class to dominate society. In most pre-Abrahamist cultures the priest class only played a tangential, though often important, role in subservience to the warrior/ruling class. In many of these cultures true "spiritual salvation", in the form of after life rewards, was only available to the warrior class. Of course all pre-Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions were not warrior/ruler based, but most most were. Judaism was a universal-by-tribe religion while Christianity raised this to a universal-by-acceptance religion. Of course Islam began as a tribal religion using the wider meme "acceptance" method of Christianity.

Abrahamism changed the "salvation" meme into a universal reward for obedience and elevated the priest class into the central social role by merging the warrior/ruling class into a armed servant of the priesthood. The "king" and the ruling class becomes first and foremost answerable to "God" ergo the priesthood. Universal reward strengthens the priesthood by ensuring social loyalty of all society members.


1). God-meme as universal perfect creator,
2). Damnation of humanity for imperfection,
3). Salvation through obedience to God (ergo priest class)
4). Punishment, both earthly and divine, for disobedience.


If the system wasn't so destructive it could be admired for it's brilliance at social manipulation. The logical holes are not readily apparent to any semi-literate culture and the meme is universally enforced through violence. Only in the last few centuries have Christians feared damnation by God more than damnation by the priest class, and in the Islamic world the damnation by the priest class remains the major method of meme enforcement. It is rather difficult over generations not to accept the validity of and pass on as "Truth" the salvation/damnation meme.


All this makes for very interesting socio-historical inquiry. What makes it even more interesting is that you will have relatively educated people who adhere to this rather hollow meme-scape without questioning the details.

The question for debate would be the validity of approaching religion as a social meme. Are the doctrines of Abrahamism more than a interesting effort at priest-based social control? And especially in light of the huge profit available in religion, is religion-as-meme as social control as business merely a successful cultural marketing formula which predates the modern study of marketing?

[Furrowed Brow]

I’ve have a problem with memes. On the one had they provide a cultural analogue for a gene. However we can pin genes down. We know their form. Our understanding of the complexities of their function improves almost daily. This is where the analogy breaks down, and memes stop being fully scientific. We cannot use memes to make predictions, we cannot test for them, I’m pretty sure they can’t be falsified, we don’t know what their form is, and other than generalisations we have no idea as to how to quantify their function. We can pick any prominent cultural symbol, icon, fad etc, be that God or trainers without laces and call that a meme. As far as methodology goes this is dubious. Just about anything might be called a meme.

Whilst we should question the social and psychological mechanism that allow one group to gain advantage over another by making themselves the guardians of all things cosmic, I’m not sure memes really explain anything at all, or how useful they are for teasing out the power plays, social forces and interplays between group and individual. I suspect their usefulness is as a reminder to us how far we are influenced by others, and how much of our behaviour is group lead. In this sense they serve to raise our awareness. But as a methodology or analytical tool I don’t think memes and memescapes get us very far.

[Rathpig]

But as a methodology or analytical tool I don’t think memes and memescapes get us very far.

Memes are an aspect of the humanities rather than the hard sciences. The analogy to genes can only be used in a limited sense. As cultural indicators memes provide a useful analytical tool because this allows ideas to be traced across various avenues of cultural transfer. Of course there are limits. As with any aspect of humanistic study one must consult the range of disciplines from psychology and sociology to history and anthropology to obtain a comprehensive view of the idea being evaluated.

Taking a strict hard science approach is simply not possible in any of the humanistic fields.

(As a side note and a student of history, I wish that a hard science approach was possible, but we are dealing with limited and biased information. At best we can only discuss the probability of truth.)