Keith Henson wrote:
snip
> The distinction between cults and religions is real and useful. Cults are > outright parasites, religions are the same mental parasites that have > co-evolved with their hosts long enough to become more useful than harmful. > > Takes about 300 years. > > And at least one function of religions is to fill up the "religious meme > receptor" in human mental space to make infection with a dangerous parasite > less likely. (This may be less true in today's memetic ecosystem than it > was in the past.) > > Keith Henson
Keith-- I'm not sure I agree, but I like the biological parallels here!
Ghod knows I have been making them long enough. My first article on this subject was published in Analog Aug 1987.
"I have picked dangerous examples for vivid illustrations and to point out that memes have a life of their own. The ones that kill their hosts make this hard to ignore. However, most memes, like most microorganisms, are either helpful or at least harmless. Some may even provide a certain amount of defense from the very harmful ones. It is the natural progression of parasites to become symbiotes, and the first symbiotic behavior that emerges in a proto-symbiote is for it to start protecting its host from other parasites. I have come to appreciate the common religions in this light. Even if they were harmful when they started, the ones that survive over generations evolve and do not cause too much damage to their hosts. Calvin (who had dozens of people executed over theological disputes) would hardly recognize Presbyterians three hundred years later. Contrariwise, the Shaker meme is now confined to books, and the Shakers are gone. It is clearly safer to believe in a well-aged religion than to be susceptible to a potentially fatal cult. "
http://groups.google.ca/groups?q=insubject:original+author:Keith+author:Henson&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=hkhensonE5ozq9.K8x%40netcom.com&rnum=1
Taking your last point first, I'd say that it would now be more useful to have a safe religion as a "cult agonist", blocking the religion receptor site, than it was in the past. For there are many more cults around now than there were in ages past, which increases the danger of infection.
You might be right on this point, but there were a lot of dangerous cults about in the past. For example the children's crusades in 1212 resulted in a few tens of thousands dying.
.
http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/children.html
(Although if all one needs to do is block a receptor, the blocking does not have to be done by a religion. I seem to use a dogma-free amalgam of several religions as a blocker. : ) )
My favorite is the Church of the SubGenius--which is distantly related to (of all things) scientology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius
You might get more mileage out of an analogy between cults and diseases, rather than parasites. A cult would be like a germ that was too virulent, and killed its host. A religion would be like a chronic/harmless infection, which did not interfere too much with the life of its host.
There is a reason to use the parasite model. As I mentioned in the clip above, it is a common progression over evolutionary time for a parasite to become a mutualistic symbiote. Disease and parasites are often the same thing, malaria for example.
Certainly there were many cults that stopped their members from recruiting more members, for various reasons. The Shakers died out because their cult interfered with the reproductive cycle of its host. Most apocalyptic cults turn inward a bit before the predicted apocalypse. This seriously interferes with their ability to recruit more members. And so on...
Correct, but *after* the date some of them get more into recruiting. The JWs are an example.
Keith Henson
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