Re: virus: Jesus as a Memetic Engineer

Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 23:25:00 -0500


Eva-Lise Carlstrom wrote:

> I will follow your pointers and expect to modify my claims. Are there
> such quotations from Jesus in the other Gospels, or only in Matthew?

I'll look some more up for you: (but you can read them)

Mark 9:42-50; 12:40
Luke 10:8-15; 20:47
John 5:29

Of course, like I said before, Jesus covered his ass pretty well.
Check this out: Luke 13:2-5. It seems to support a "just death" Hell!

> Uh huh. This might be the easy way out, abandoning hope of tracing human
> (/divine) intent accurately, but it certainly is a valid approach.
> If we want to analyze a scheme like Christianity with regard to its
> memetic success according to original intentions, though, we have to delve
> into those murky speculations. Noting that a scheme has been "successful"
> in that it's hugely widespread is not the same thing as knowing that what
> has spread is what the author or authors intended. So if we want to learn
> from past efforts how to spread a memeset, we should try to understand the
> mutations as well as the propagation. No good learning how to make
> *something* spread if we can't make it be the memes we wanted in the first
> place!

Good point! I'm thinking again about <faith><evangalize>, and how
powerful a combination that is... it simply out-propagates the
alternatives! Christianity doesn't have to be that way, but it *is*,
for the most part. Simply becuase that is the "good memes" version of
it.

As to how we go about guarding against something like that: I'm not sure
we can. Promote level 3 to the max, I guess. "Responsible freedom" is
about level 3 awareness. (and, of course, we have to go out and
evangalize, too!)

ERiC