The Meme Machine

CHAPTER 15
Religions as memeplexes
Like it or not, we are surrounded by religions. The ‘Great Faiths’ of the world
have lasted thousands of years and affect our calendars and holidays, our
education and upbringing, our beliefs and our morality, all over the world people
spend vast amounts of time and money worshipping their gods and building
glorious monuments in which to do it. We cannot get away from religions, but
using memetics we can understand how and why they have such power.
All the great religions of the world began as small-scale cults, usually with a
charismatic leader, and over the years a few of them spread to take in billions of
people all across the planet. Imagine just how many small cults there must have
been in the history of the world. The question is why did these few survive to
become the great faiths, while the vast majoring simply died out with the death
of their leader or the dispersal of their few adherents?
Dawkins was the first to give memetic answers (Dawkins 1986, 1993,
1996b), although his ideas on religion have frequently been criticised (Bowker
1995; Gatherer 1998). He took Roman Catholicism as an example. The memes
of Catholicism include the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient God, the belief
that Jesus Christ was the son of God, born of the virgin Mary, risen from the
dead after his crucifixion and now (and for ever) able to hear our prayers. In
addition, Catholics believe that their priests can absolve them from sins after
confession, the Pope literally speaks the word of God, and when priests
administer the mass, the bread and wine literally change into the flesh and blood
of Christ.
To anyone uninfected with any Christian memes these ideas must seem
bizarre in the extreme. How can an invisible God be both omnipotent and
omniscient? Why should we believe a two-thousand-year-old story that a virgin
gave birth? What could it possibly mean to say that the wine ‘literally’ becomes
the blood of Christ? How could someone have died for our sins when we were
not even born? How could he rise from the dead, and where is he now? How
could a prayer, said silently to yourself, really work?
There are many claims for the efficacy of prayer in healing the sick, and even
a little experimental evidence (Benor 1994; Dossey 1993), but few of the