This is fantastic! Thanks guys, you’re a great help!
I want to take the discussion in a direction that will demonstrate that the argument
here is disproved. That is, the argument that most religions teach that they are the one true path to salvation and all unbelievers are cast into hell.
The link is one to a really good page that directly attacks Christianity, what do we make of it ladies and gentlemen?
The arguments I see on that page are a mixture of some good points and some questionable ones.
Many Catholics actually believe that Catholicism is, in fact, the one true path to salvation and all unbelievers are cast into hell. My mother, for example, was taught that very explicitly when she was young. It always bothered her that the neighborhood friends she played with were all going to hell. This sort of teaching is poisonous, and as I recall was promoted widely several decades ago by a renegade intellectual who ended up excommunicated over it.
Now, one thing I found disturbing was that it seemed like it was holding up Buddhism over Christianity. Buddhism has some really good points and learning some have been a blessing to me, but the honest and informed Catholic knows that the Catholic Church has no shortage that Buddhism needs to fill. The same goals that Buddhism strives for can be found in the Catholic Church, for those who have a
full prayer life. There is no need to “go east young man” but many Catholics don’t know that because, without having the appropriate Catholice “meme immune system” they are lured by partial truths.
Also there seems to be a bit of demonization going on by considering a dogmatic religion as a meme. That is one way to look at it, but there is nothing necessarily wrong with being a meme. The article described only parasitic memes, but there are symbiotic memes and just plain healthy ones. Thus “Christ was raised from the dead” is or course a meme, but it cannot be presumed to be parasitic.
I think “memes” are better looked at as “genes” such as genes in our DNA. They define our periphery consciousness and guide our focused consciousness, as well as participate in making connections based on abstractions the meme symbolizes to the host based on the whole meme system.
There are parasitic memes to be sure, such as “the end justifies the means.” These might be looked at as viruses
Actually a religion could be considered a meme immune system just as easily as a meme. Meme immune systems are what we use to fight off parasitic memes which reduce our mental or emotional health, or attach our belief systems. Memes can be antiviruses as well as viruses.
One very simplistic meme immune system is this; if Rome says it, it is final. Then one need not agonize over being an apologist, if faced with heresy they need only to say, “prove that Rome says it and I will believe you.”
I think we can have fascinating discussions about how ideas can propagate, and counterattack using the idea of memes. We can probably come up with some useful models of why people think the way they do about Catholicism.
Personally I think that the apophatic tradition of the Catholic Church is just as powerful and probably much more so, than Buddhism as an agent of transformation. Buddhist memes easily gain inroads into the host minds of Catholics who have never heard of this part of Catholicism.
That’s why we have to be careful about contemplative prayer, that it remains Christian. We can learn some things from Buddhists, but they are missing one important thing: Christ. My own mental immune system just now fortified itself by attaching Christ attached to a small mutation on a rather persistent old meme that once infected me from an American Express ad: “Christ, don’t go home without Him.”
Alan
