[ExI] Damage Due to Religion ?

[Lee Corbin]

Keith writes

> At 11:56 PM 10/5/2007, James Clement wrote:
> 
>>I have a pdf version of William Draper's excellent 1874 book; "The History
>>of the Conflict Between Religion and Science," which I would be happy to
>>email to anyone interested.  It starts with the Greeks, in the 4th Century
>>BCE, and progress through the 19th Century.
> 
> While there has certainly been memetic competition between memes or 
> meme sets of science and religion, I don't think a case can be made 
> for "damage" as in war damage.

That seems right to me.

> The point of the EP model I presented was that the spread of xenophobic
> memes is a step on the path to war, but not causal, just a consequence of
> the way human psychological traits were wired up by evolution.

You are now saying that the spread of xenophobic memes is not 
causal, i.e., does not cause war?  That it is just a symptom or
signature?  If that's what you are saying, then yes, I did miss that
(but then, I probably have not attended your writings as much as
I could have, due to time constraints).

I would have sworn that you saw a causal step in the spread of such
memes.

> BTW, the model is either so obvious that people won't comment about 
> it or so hard to understand that they won't.  I can't tell which from 
> near zero responses.

Alas, these days on this list one can never tell anything from zero
responses. All of the above is in part explained by the difficulties
of having to cope with too much information.

Lee