[ExI] ai is the easy road

[Keith Henson]

Points taken.

The question is, why do humans have religions? Or maybe that is the wrong
way around. Why do religions (considered as mental parasites) have people?

Some of the elements are obvious: the ability of humans to spread memes
around. EP says common behavior has evolved. I suspect that the common
ability of humans to be mentally infested with religions is a side effect
of something else that was selected. Somewhat like the ability to be
addicted is a side effect of reward mechanisms in the brain.

In spite of thinking about this for decades, my understanding of this
subject is not clear. I strongly suspect religions are related to selection
for war, but the model is not obvious.

Keith


On Sat, Oct 17, 2026 at 3:59 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 16, 2026 at 3:24 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *> Marxism should be classed as a religion.*
>>
>
> *I don't think Marxism was a religion but Communism definitely was. The
> books that Karl Marx wrote were stupid but they were not so stupid as to
> claim that his political ideas could be expanded to explain the workings of
> the hard sciences, like the idiot  Trofim Lysenko
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko> did in biology. And some
> Communist "philosophers" insisted that Einstein's Relativity must be wrong
> because it  contradicted dialectical materialism and undermined the
> material objectivity of the universe that their political ideology
> demanded. Crap like that is religion. *
>
> *>  a lot of wars in the last couple of thousand years can be classed as
>> religious wars up to and including the conflict in Vietnam.*
>>
>
> *You could add 911 to that list, and without religion you wouldn't have
> Arabs and Jews in the Middle East, you'd just have people. With the
> exception of death itself, religion has caused more misery than anything
> else.*
>
> *John K Clark  *
>
>
>
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