The Meme Machine

RELIGIONS AS MEMEPLEXES 191
relatives, but with horizontal transmission other means of recognition are
needed. One is ‘Be good to those who act like you’. It works like this. If you
see someone else who acts the same way as you do, it is likely that you both
have cultural ancestors in common. If you now help him you make it more
likely that he will be successful, and hence that he will pass on his memes,
including the rule ‘Be good to those who act like you’. Allison calls this a
‘marker scheme’. He gives the examples of wearing a turban or abstaining from
certain foods, but we might add supporting Manchester United or listening to
hip-hop, as well as genuflecting or wearing a little portrait of your guru round
your neck. He adds that markers that are costly or difficult to learn can deter
exploitation by outsiders. Apart from languages, a good example is religious
rituals. Many of these require years to learn and others, such as ritual
circumcision, are certainly costly for an adult.
The result of this kind of altruism is that people are kind and generous to the
in-group and not to outsiders. This boosts the well-being of the group’s
members and hence makes them more likely to be imitated, and so pass on the
faith. This is exactly what we see in many of the world’s greatest religions.
Although the instruction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is commonly taken to
mean ‘love everyone’, in the tribal context in which it was first rewritten it may
have been meant more literally – in other words love your own tribe, and your
own family, but not everybody else (Hartung 1995). Even the admonition not to
kill may originally have applied only to the in-group. Hartung points out that
the rabbis of the Talmud used to hold an Israelite guilty of murder if he
intentionally killed another Israelite, but killing other people did not count.
Some religions positively encourage murder and war against people of other
faiths. Islam has fatwas and jihads to justify killing unbelieving, and especially
those who harm or renounce the faith. In February 1989, the Ayatollah
Khomeini delivered his famous fatwa on the author Salman Rushdie. This is a
direct call to all Muslims to murder Rushdie for daring to blaspheme against the
holy Koran in his book Satanic Verses. When the punishment for renouncing or
criticising a religion is so severe, the memes are very ably protected.
Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike have gone to war again and again in
the name of God. When a few hundred Spaniards murdered thousands of Incas,
leading to the destruction of an entire civilisation, they did it for the glory of
God and the holy Catholic Faith. In a subtler way religious missionaries are still
destroying ancient cultures even today. People have been tortured, burned alive,
and shot because they believed the wrong thing. Religions teach that God wants
you to spread his True understanding to all the world and it is therefore good to