[extropy-chat] Islamic morons win yet again

[John]

I like that idea.

Although, I've been working on my own, and it's to do with how religion 
effects the efficiency of your life.

The entire point of most religions is for your to remain stupid and not 
think too much. If you sin or do wrong (including murdering and raping), you 
can always say sorry to god about it and you're sorted.

Being agnostic, that got me to comparing that with my own life.

I don't have a god to say sorry to. If I'm nasty to someone, or hurt their 
feelings (even online), that's my fault alone and I have to stress about it 
personally. I compare myself to my neighbor a lot, an Irish woman who is a 
regular church goer. Yet for the entire time I've lived next door to her (22 
years now) all I've ever had from her is insulting remarks or her inviting 
herself into my personal life - she has, more than once, accused me face to 
face of lying to her about things as simple as cutting her plants. Neither 
does she remember my name, whilst I remember hers & her past job, her 
husband's & his jobs (past and present), her son's, her two dogs (who have 
been dead for years), a medical condition her son has and that they like 
going on walking holidays with a caravan. It made me wonder if perhaps this 
was easier for her to do because she new she had god on her side, or at 
least could say sorry to him about not being a very nice person.

Next up came mind time. I spend every single day reading pages of stuff like 
this and journals. It's very difficult for me to find spare time to do other 
things and get on with less complex hobbies - like sitting around getting 
high watching Springer.

Being agnostic is basically stressful. And stress is an important factor in 
lifespan. Being truly agnostic (not an atheist wanting to disguise your 
biases) uses up a lot of your spare time, in which others are out raising 
families. I would also guess that 'nerds' where around a long time ago, the 
kind of monkeys who stressed about working out the latest stick collecting 
technique for ants. Now, for a short period, that monkey will have an 
increased chance of reproducing with it's new trick (like internet heroes of 
today). But it won't take very long for another monkey to steal the idea or 
bully it's way into taking that advantage - exactly the same thing is still 
happening now in corporations (your patent is our patent).

Religious people (including atheists) are, in general, working on the short 
term. They need someone to excuse their mistakes and the promise of some 
super reward when they're done with the short term.

Agnostics and scientists in general don't have that so much.

So that's my line of thought, that religion makes life easier for you by 
massively minimising the need for long term predictions (which require vast 
knowledge bases to make - an 'escape velocity', to use Aubrey's term, of 
knowledge).

This also gets me on to an important question, I think. Is it fair to take 
religion away from some people?

Say you work in a factory packing boxes 12 hours a day. You don't really 
have anywhere near enough free time to form a knowledge base large enough to 
make long term predictions. In these examples, perhaps it's not so bad that 
these people do have something like religion to keep them smiling.

I believe the annoyance comes when we find people who most definitely do 
have the spare time to form more knowledgeable opinions, it's just that they 
can't be bothered.

Remember that the church, ironically, used to be one of the driving forces 
of science and simply took money off it's crowd to fund it's work, all the 
time knowing they were proles who didn't understand it, now we have 
government issued tax and a kind of role reversal almost.

John

> 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
>
>
>
>
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