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Do you mow your lawn with a lawnmower, or with prayer?

As Parapundit recently noticed in his posting "Danimal On Islam, Bars, And A Fallacy Of Composition", the Danimal Archive contains many excellent observations about religion, among other things. This is not that surprising, since the guy is a former fundamentalist Christian himself. As a taste, consider the following observation about what gave the major monotheistic religions their power.

If you want to wipe out a religion, you begin by wiping out its organization. After just a few generations, a systematically oppressed religion can be eradicated like an infectious disease after a comprehensive vaccination program.

Not too many people take Zeus and Odin seriously today, not because the arguments for Zeus and Odin have become any less persuasive, nor because the emotional payoff from worshipping those gods is any less than it ever was, but because hardly anybody happens to be earning a living by promoting the worship of Zeus or Odin just now.

That is, there is no organized religion hawking Zeus or Odin, and thus there is no faith in them.

Once Christianity took hold in Europe, it set about burning all the priests who taught people to worship Zeus, Odin, etc. Against that successful systematic attack on their organized religions, Zeus and Odin didn't stand a chance. Christianity had a competitive edge against the polytheistic religions it replaced, because polytheism allows for new gods to be added, such as the Christian gods, but once the Christian memes snuck in they set about eliminating the earlier inclusive polytheistic memes. Much like the way Hitler won a democratic election, and then set about dismantling democracy.

No organized religion means eventually no faith. Today, most Christian nations have liberalized, and would allow people to worship Zeus and Odin again, but amazingly nobody seems to be interested. It's like exterminating all the dodo birds and then saying, "OK dodo birds, you can come back now, we won't shoot you."

If the atheists want to eliminate Christianity and Islam, there is the battle plan. Eliminate the organized religion and let everybody "do their own thing", and within a few generations there will be no religion. By themselves, Gods and their religious writings are powerless, since they need the organization of religion to advocate and maintain them.

In the more primitive times, when some religion was eliminated, other religions immediately took its place. This is because everything sucked and people could only dream about a paradise. In the primitive world, absolutely nothing ever visibly improved at least within a person's short lifespan, and everyone had to work like dogs for their puny and meager living. Since religion is based on imagination instead of logic and reality, it basically only helped to guarantee that nothing ever improved, since maintaining the religion required tight communities of people who constantly reinforce each other's groupthink. Only when the overwhelming evidence of objective reality forced a religion to give in in some particular issue, progress could happen. At best, religion accidentally helped the march of progress by keeping the unwashed masses under control and spreading some useful memes such as "don't steal" that allowed science and free market to operate more efficiently.

These days we have science and technology and the comforts that they produce, and we can constantly improve them so that life no longer sucks and only keeps getting better by leaps and bounds. Even now, science and technology offer us constant miracles, such as the vanishingly improbable fact that you can look at your computer monitor see this text that I typed here on the other side of the world. Once technology reaches a certain level, which might optimistically happen perhaps a hundred years from now, so that all our physical needs are satisfied in an artificial abundance instead of leaving them to the slim pickings of the cold nature that doesn't care about our well-being one way or the other, that's curtains for religion. Real miracles and real comfort trump imagined miracles and imagined comfort every time. Or as The Danimal once put it:

While predicting the future is difficult, to say the least, I suspect that at some point advancing technology will take the wind out of fundamentalist Islam's sails. Islam, like all the major religions, evolved in an environment of primitive technology. In primitive conditions, many wants go chronically unmet---for example, the average man cannot have 72 virgin girls to call his own. To deal with frustration, humans exercise their imaginations to dream up religions which assure them all their frustration is for a good reason.

Once technology removes many of the most annoying frustrations from human experience, religion is no longer necessary. It will persist for some time, of course, due to simple human inertia. But once technology solves a problem, and clearly solves it better than some useless religious ritual, people tend to abandon the useless religious ritual.

For example, it's now less common for farming people to sacrifice their children to placate the weather gods. Scientists cannot predict the weather far enough in advance to help farmers much, but scientists have explained enough about the weather to convince most farmers that sacrificing your children doesn't have much impact. Butterfly effects notwithstanding.

Modern transportation technology has made travel much easier, safer, and faster than it used to be. In ancient times, people used to daydream about having the ability to move around quickly, and not too surprisingly this is a common feature of religious myth: stories about people being magically transported long distances in short times. But today, you don't see too many religious people expecting their gods to teleport them instantly around the planet. Technology has relieved the gods of that burden.

Information is the enemy of religion. For Jihadis to learn robot hacking, they have to open up their culture on a broad scale to the full range of foreign ideas. Over time, that dilutes the ideological dominance of the local religion.

We are at a curious time in history, when we have just enough technology to allow religious dullards to be dangerous, but not quite enough technology to eliminate the need for religion.

2 comments

""If the atheists want to eliminate Christianity and Islam, there is the battle plan. Eliminate the organized religion and let everybody "do their own thing", and within a few generations there will be no religion. "

It does not work, for example Soviet Union tried that and failed miserably.

Human mind is probably hardwired to be religious (obviously not everybody) so I think it is matter of genetic engineering. But I am not sure why would you want to eradict religion? According to statistics, religious people are less prone to crime (ofcourse they are, who would want to burn in hell??) and overall better citizens.

People use and need it as spiritual walking-stick.

Anonymous,

prosperity and technological advancement do weaken religion. That is obvious.

But your first observation is correct. The elimination of religious organizations is not enough. Indeed, in the former Soviet Union religiosity has been on the rise for the past couple of decades.

I also believe that the human mind is hardwired towards religiosity, the extent of which obviously depends on the individual. Some people are more predisposed to religiousity than others. I remember a documentary on BBC World or Prisma about the basis of religiousity in the brain. Some people were likely to experience strong feelings of presence (of something) when magnetic fields of certain characteristics were applied to certain areas of their brains. Religious visions may be related to epilepsia. Some types of meditation or prayer tend to induce experiences some people consider religious.

So, why would anyone want to eradicate religiosity?

The principal danger of religion is in that it sometimes effectively conserves attitudes and practices which may otherwise be instantly rejected because of their insanity. Consider islamic jihad, for instance. What a recipe for mayhem in our age of weapons of mass desctruction.

Church-going christians probably are somewhat more law-abiding than the general population. But are believers in other religion? There is no justification for such a generalization. Muslims are vastly overrepresented among prisoner populations many Western European countries. For example, I read somewhere that out of French prisoner population, every one in four is a muslim. On the other hand, devout muslims are almost certainly more law-abiding than the general population in countries ruled according to islamic law.

Involuntary death (barring accidents or violence) will be eliminated by the end of the century, probably much sooner by technology, if Kurzweil is right. The notion of "afterlife" will lose much of it's attraction, don't you think.

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