richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

200 THE GO D D E L USION
• Everybody, even those who do not hold religious beliefs, must
respect them with a higher level of automatic and unquestioned
respect than that accorded to other kinds of belief (we met this
in Chapter 1).
• There are some weird things (such as the Trinity, transubstantiation,
incarnation) that we are not meant to understand. Don't
even try to understand one of these, for the attempt might
destroy it. Learn how to gain fulfilment in calling it a mystery.
• Beautiful music, art and scriptures are themselves selfreplicating
tokens of religious ideas.*
Some of the above list probably have absolute survival value and
would flourish in any memeplex. But, as with genes, some memes
survive only against the right background of other memes, leading
to the build-up of alternative memeplexes. Two different religions
might be seen as two alternative memeplexes. Perhaps Islam is
analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a
herbivorous one. The ideas of one religion are not 'better' than
those of the other in any absolute sense, any more than carnivorous
genes are 'better' than herbivorous ones. Religious memes of this
kind don't necessarily have any absolute aptitude for survival;
nevertheless, they are good in the sense that they flourish in the
presence of other memes of their own religion, but not in
the presence of memes of the other religion. On this model, Roman
Catholicism and Islam, say, were not necessarily designed by
individual people, but evolved separately as alternative collections
of memes that flourish in the presence of other members of the
same memeplex.
Organized religions are organized by people: by priests and
bishops, rabbis, imams and ayatollahs. But, to reiterate the point I
made with respect to Martin Luther, that doesn't mean they were
conceived and designed by people. Even where religions have been
* Different schools and genres of art can be analysed as alternative memeplexes,
as artists copy ideas and motifs from earlier artists, and new motifs survive only if
they mesh with others. Indeed, the whole academic discipline of History of Art,
with its sophisticated tracing of iconographies and symbolisms, could be seen as
an elaborate study in memeplexity. Details will have been favoured or disfavoured
by the presence of existing members of the meme pool, and these will often include
religious memes.