The Meme Machine

192 THE MEME MACHINE
maim, rape, pillage, steal, and murder.
We saw how the conspiracy theory protects UFO memes; similar
mechanisms protect religious memes. As Dawkins (1993) points out, good
Catholics have faith; they do not need proof. Indeed, it is a measure of how
spiritual and religious you are that you have faith enough to believe in
completely impossible things without asking questions, such as that the wine is
really turned into blood. This assertion cannot be tested because the liquid in
the cup still tastes, looks and smells like wine – you must just have faith that it is
really Christ’s blood. If you are tempted by doubt, you must resist. Not only is
God invisible but he ‘moves in mysterious ways’. The mystery is part of the
whole package and to be admired in its own right. This untestability protects the
memes from rejection.
Religious memes are stored, and thus given improved longevity, in the great
religious texts. The theologian Hugh Pyper (1998) describes the Bible as one of
the most successful texts ever produced. ‘If “survival of the fittest” has any
validity as a slogan, then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the
fittest of texts’ (p. 70). It has been translated into over two thousand languages,
exists in many different versions within some of those languages, and even in a
country like Japan, where only one or two per cent of the population are
Christians, more than a quarter of all households possesses a copy. Pyper argues
that Western culture is the Bible’s way of making more Bibles. And why is it so
successful? Because it alters its environment in a way that increases the chances
of its being copied. It does this, for example, by including within itself many
instructions to pass it on, and by describing itself as indispensable to the people
who read it. It is extremely adaptable, and since much of its content is selfcontradictory
it can be used to justify more or less any action or moral stance.
When we look at religions from a meme’s eye view we can understand why
they have been so successful. These religious memes did not set out with an
intention to succeed. They were just behaviours, ideas and stories that were
copied from one person to another in the long history of human attempts to
understand the world. They were successful because they happened to come
together into mutually supportive gangs that included all the right tricks to keep
them safely stored in millions of brains, books and buildings, and repeatedly
passed on to more. They evoked strong emotions and strange experiences.
They provided myths to answer real questions and the myths were protected by
untestability, threats, and promises. They created and then reduced fear to create