evad the prophet

[quote] Among many anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, it has recently become fashionable to dismiss all religions as memes... <hr></blockquote>
I think thats a pretty charged statement. Maybe its even a meme.

Susan Blackmore says that "The vast majority [of memes] make up the very stuff of our lives, including languages, political systems, financial institutions, education, science and technology. All these are memes (or conglomerations of memes), because they are copied from person to person and vie for survival in the limited space of human memories and culture."
More examples from Susan- "Memes are stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions and ways of doing things that we copy from person to person by imitation. "
If we "dismiss all religions as memes" then should we also dismiss all other memes, including: secular humanism, ethics, Darwin's theory of evolution, or even the " meme meme"?

In 1976 Richard Dawkins introduced the word meme in his best-selling book, The Selfish Gene. The book is all about Darwinian evolution and describes the process as information getting copied over and over, variations appearing among copies, and selection of some variants over others. Dawkins' term for the information that gets copied is "replicator" and he said that evolution doesnt just happen with genes, but works with any replicator. As an example, the meme. Memes getting copied from one person to another, just like genes from parent to child, dont always get copied exactly. In repeating a story, we sometimes forget details, change a name or embelish a little, just like in a game of telephone. Some variations keep getting copied again and again, some die out, and there you have it, evolution.

Since the introduction of the meme in 1976, its been copied over and over from one brain to the next, so that today, lots and lots of people know about memes. It got copied into my brain, now im putting another copy (with variations) here, and anyone reading this is now infected. Clearly, "meme" is a meme. (How's that for self-referential?)
But now we can see that the definition of meme given in the article above- "...any self-referential belief-system which contains within itself the instructions for its own propagation " -is not an exact or even complete copy of the original definition given by Dawkins. We are dealing with something much bigger. Again, i have to quote Blackmore:

<center>"Thinking memetically gives rise to a new vision of the world, one that, when you "get" it, transforms everything. From the meme’s-eye view, every human is a machine for making more memes—a vehicle for propagation, an opportunity for replication and a resource to compete for. We are neither the slaves of our genes nor rational free agents creating culture, art, science and technology for our own happiness. Instead we are part of a vast evolutionary process in which memes are the evolving replicators and we are the meme machines.
This new vision is stunning and scary: stunning because now one simple theory encompasses all of human culture and creativity as well as biological evolution; scary because it seems to reduce great swathes of our humanity, of our activities and our intellectual lives, to a mindless phenomenon."

"In other words you and I and all our friends are the products of two blind replicators, the genes and the memes. "
</center>

Blackmore's conclusion : the "self" is really just a co-adapted meme-complex.

Having said all that, now i'd like to discuss memes and religion in this context.
Nawhead points out that the original versions of Islam and Christianity do not fit the article's version
of the meme, and that the description of "religion" given in the article seems to be the religion of some crazy person- "Help people who believe in this meme, attack people who do not" - that has nothing to do with Islam or Christianity.
We already saw that the article's version of the meme doesnt agree with Dawkin's original version, and it's pretty clear that the examples of "religion" are very distorted crazy versions of the originals.

I used kindofa lot of space on defining memes and giving examples, that last one being the weirdest that i'd like to say again a little more clearly: the conscious you that is not your spirit nor your body is a conglomeration of memes.

As for religion and spirituality I'm not going to get into a big definition except to say that prayer, meditation, dance, ect. as a spiritual practice, is all about transcendence. Both Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns have the same transcendent experience when they meditate / pray. Scans of their brains show the same quieting-down of activity in the same parts of the brain- called the orientation area. During "normal" consciousness, this part of the brain is constantly checking and updating on where your "self" ends and the rest of the universe begins, your own "personal borders", as it were.
During a transcendent (spiritual) moment, as activity quiets down in these brain areas, the "self" is said to fall away, and consciousness remains, expanding in all directions throughout the universe.
This is an utterly real experience, say neurologists, not imagined. It is at this point that the..........

Damn this is some krazy shit i cant go on.

Let me finish by saying this:
1 this essay is totally scientific.
2 totally superior intelligent people believe this is true.
3 because this is true, you should tell all your friends about it so that they dont remain ignorant morons.
4 anyone who does not believe this is an ignorant moron.
5 Evad the prophet loves you.

__________________
by the rivers of babylon,
there we sat down,
yea, we wept,
when we remembered zion.