[extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again

[Keith Henson]

At 01:19 AM 9/27/2006 -0400, you wrote:

snip

>There was no major difficulty cutting off the heads of Poseidon, Buddha or
>even Jesus; but Muhammad was another matter.
>
>All religions are stupid, but some religions are more stupid than others.

There is a far more paranoid approach to religions.

The capacity to have religions (that is the parasitic to symbiotic memes 
that infest human populations) is a function (like everything else) of some 
feature of human brains that either was directly selected or is a side 
effect of some feature that was selected in the environment of evolutionary 
adaptiveness (EEA).

I have come to see religious memes as _seed xenophobic memes_.  When a 
population anticipates bad times a-coming, the gain on xenophobic memes 
gets turned up.  This is an evolved trait, i.e., the genes of people who 
did it replicated better than the genes of people who did not in the EEA.

In the EEA, bad times a-coming usually affected all the tribes or bands in 
a considerable area.

I propose that there is a selective advantage in such circumstances to 
attacking first and that it takes time for xenophobic memes to build up to 
the point warriors go on the attack.

In such circumstances, seed xenophobic would shorten the time from 
detection of ecological conditions to attack.  Thus the psychological trait 
of carrying such memes (religions) between times when they were needed 
would be favored.

This explains an awful lot of the history of religions.

Islamic society today generally faces a particularly bleak future.  So it 
should be expected that xenophobic memes in that society will be on the rise.

Unless something like nanotechnology intervenes to massively improve the 
economic outlook of Islamic populations, they will attack.

The western choice will be between killing them as a religious (Christian) 
duty or killing them dispassionately.

Not much of a choice from my viewpoint.  :-(

Keith Henson