The Meme Machine

188 THE MEME MACHINE
experiments have controlled adequately for placebo effects, expectation, and
spontaneous recovery, and some have shown that people with the strongest
religious faith were less likely to recover from acute illness (King et al. 1994).
Against the claims are hundreds of years of people praying for the health of their
royal families or heads of state with no apparent effect, and the inability of
modern-day religious healers to make any obvious difference in hospitals. Then
there are all those countless wars in which both sides routinely pray for God to
help their side and kill the enemy. Yet millions of people all over the world
profess themselves Catholics and pray to Jesus, his mother Mary, and God the
Father. They spend vast amounts of their valuable time and money supporting
and spreading the faith to others, and the Catholic Church is among the richest
institutions in the world. Dawkins (1993) explains how religious memes, even if
they are not true, can be successful.
The Catholic God is watching at all times and will punish people who
disobey His commandments with most terrible punishments – burning forever in
hell, for example. These threats cannot easily be tested because God and hell are
invisible, and the fear is inculcated from early childhood. A friend of mine
showed me a book he once treasured as a child. It had pictures of a little good
boy and a little bad boy. You could open up the flaps of their blazers and inside
the good boy find a white and shining heart, while the bad boy had a black spot
for every sin he had committed. Imagine the power of that image when you
cannot see inside your own body and must only imagine the little black spots
piling up and piling up – when you talk in class or cheat in a test, when you take
your sister’s toy or steal a chocolate biscuit, when you think a bad thought, or
doubt God’s truth and goodness . . . every one a black spot.
Having raised the fear, Catholicism reduces it again. If you turn to Christ
you will be forgiven. If you honestly repent of your sins, bring up your children
as Catholics, and go regularly to mass, then, even though you are unworthy and
sinful, God will forgive you. God’s love is always available but at a price, and
that price is often overlooked completely because it is paid so willingly. It is the
price of investing massive amounts of time, energy and money in your religion –
in other words, working for the memes. As Dawkins pointed out, Catholics
work hard to spread their Catholicism.
I previously described several meme tricks that New Age memeplexes use.
All these can be found in religions too. First, like alien abduction and near-death
experience memes, religions serve a real function. They supply answers to all
sorts of age-old human questions such as: Where do we come from? Why are
we here? Where do we go when we die? Why is the world full of suffering?