Religion is a Zombie Virus
- Thread starter Illuminattile
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Good analogy. Richard Dawkins is a brillant man, and its actually entertaining to hear him lecture. His other video at a womans college at www.richarddawkins.net is great too, he reads portions from his books and answers questions from the audience (which about a 3rd of the questions coming from students from Trinity College). Whats funny is in the video of The Blind Watchmaker he wears short shorts
That virus analogy is, I believe, something Dawkins came up with. He first mentions it no later than 1976. And, actually, any idea that spreads is a "virus of the mind." Any song, etc. Dawkins calls them "memes." Some negative, some positive.
from an interview with Dawkins, 1997:
"Any rule that says "Believe everything you're told" is automatically going to be vulnerable to parasitization. Computers, for example, are vulnerable to parasitization because they believe all they're told. If you tell them in the right programming language, they'll do it. Computer viruses work by somebody writing a program that says, "Duplicate me and, while you're at it, erase this entire disk."
My point is that the survival mechanism that makes children's brains believe what they're told -- for good reason -- is automatically vulnerable to parasitic codes such as "You must believe in the great juju in the sky," or "You must kneel down and face east and pray five times a day." These codes are then passed down through generations. And there's no obvious reason why it should stop.
There's an additional factor in the virus theory, which is that those viruses that are good at surviving will be the ones that are more likely to survive. So, if the virus says, "If you don't believe in this you will go to hell when you die," that's a pretty potent threat, especially to a child. Or, if it says, "When you become a little bit older you will meet people who will tell you the opposite of this, and they will have remarkably plausible arguments and they'll have lots of what they'll call evidence on their side and you'll be really tempted to believe it, but the more tempted you are, the more that's just Satan getting at you." This is exactly what many creationists in this country have been primed with."
Guy who helped Bill Gates develop Word, Richard Brodie, wrote a book developing this idea, called Viruses of the Mind in 1996. Worth reading. His website: http://www.memecentral.com/rbrodie.htm
from an interview with Dawkins, 1997:
"Any rule that says "Believe everything you're told" is automatically going to be vulnerable to parasitization. Computers, for example, are vulnerable to parasitization because they believe all they're told. If you tell them in the right programming language, they'll do it. Computer viruses work by somebody writing a program that says, "Duplicate me and, while you're at it, erase this entire disk."
My point is that the survival mechanism that makes children's brains believe what they're told -- for good reason -- is automatically vulnerable to parasitic codes such as "You must believe in the great juju in the sky," or "You must kneel down and face east and pray five times a day." These codes are then passed down through generations. And there's no obvious reason why it should stop.
There's an additional factor in the virus theory, which is that those viruses that are good at surviving will be the ones that are more likely to survive. So, if the virus says, "If you don't believe in this you will go to hell when you die," that's a pretty potent threat, especially to a child. Or, if it says, "When you become a little bit older you will meet people who will tell you the opposite of this, and they will have remarkably plausible arguments and they'll have lots of what they'll call evidence on their side and you'll be really tempted to believe it, but the more tempted you are, the more that's just Satan getting at you." This is exactly what many creationists in this country have been primed with."
Guy who helped Bill Gates develop Word, Richard Brodie, wrote a book developing this idea, called Viruses of the Mind in 1996. Worth reading. His website: http://www.memecentral.com/rbrodie.htm
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