Religious Parasitism, Part One

Once religions and mythologies were in place, they became a resource whereby one person or group could manipulate another person or group. That is, they became the medium through which religion memes and religious leaders could become parasitic.

Richard Dawkins explains some of the characteristics that make religious memes so effective. Humans have a desire for some kind of faith; many religion memes offer false nutrition for this desire. But that is not all. As Dawkins explains, very religious people “make a positive virtue of faith’s being strong and unshakable, in spite of not being based upon evidence. Indeed, they may feel that the less evidence there is, the more virtuous the belief” (emphasis in original). A related meme is one that says that the article of faith is a “mystery” that the human mind will never be able to understand, and the fact the article of faith seems like a howling self-contradiction is actually evidence of its truth. An example is the meme that says God is Love but that God will send everyone who is not a member of your church into hellfire, where they will suffer consciously and eternally. True believers will not even notice the contradiction between a God who is infinite love yet who will torture somebody forever without having given them a chance to avoid their fate. Some Christians even believe, as the fourth century cleric Tertullian of Carthage taught, that the blessed spirits in heaven will be able to watch the torture of the damned in hell forever.

To the person whose mind religious memes have subverted, any evidence against the memes proves them to be right, not wrong. Weaknesses become strengths. This is a positive feedback system that makes the believer fall ever deeper into religious memetic infection. “Scientists say the Earth is more than a few thousand years old? Well, what would you expect them to say? This only proves they are evil and that all of their so-called evidence is just lies.” This is not a quote that, to my knowledge, has actually been published, but it is the clear meaning behind some actual books that have been published for use in American Christian home-school science instruction. Another meme in this set is the one that says you should be intolerant, even hateful, toward people who believe differently, especially apostates who have left your religious sect.

How could such ridiculous memes have spread? Dawkins (following on ideas from evolutionary biologists Helena Cronin and Amotz Zahavi) says that successful religion memes are those that prove the faithfulness of the believer. If all you believe is that God wants you to love other people, why, almost anybody can do that. But if God wants you to believe that you have to prove your faith by shooting a doctor who performs abortions, right out in public while he is attending church (as happened in Kansas in 2009), now, that is a little more difficult. Very few people have demonstrated this much devotion to their religion. Dawkins calls this the principle of costly authentication. There seems to be a self-reinforcing cycle of costly authentication of religious zeal among the Islamist suicide bombers.

This essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, from Prometheus Books.