From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 01:22:03 MST
On 29 Jan 2002 at 1:06, L' Ermit wrote:
> [Joe Dees] I WILL tell you that subsequent mutations of the original
> monotheistic meme have evolved into increasingly violent and virulent forms,
> and the Islamic variant has proven to be by far the most resistant to the
> moderating forces of democracy, secularism, egalitarianism and modernity.
>
> [Hermit] What you (i.e. Joe) appear to be doing currently, is to propose
> that the meme defines the environment. I suspect that you are granting a
> meme more power than any has demonstrated to date and which breaks the
> genetic origin of the analogy. Reaching back to the Darwinistic evolutionary
> pattern, a meme does not define its environment, but rather, is defined by
> it. When the meme is harmful to its carriers, it will adapt or die out for
> want of carriers. The environment determines the alleles - not vice versa.
>
> [Hermit] If I dig back into history, to find Christian groups at comparable
> stages of development to most modern Muslim communities, I'd suggest that
> the monotheism of Martin Luther was far worse than that of most Muslims viz.
> [url=http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Luther_on_Jews.html]"The
> Jews and Their Lies", Martin Luther, 1543[/url] as were many of the popes.
> viz e.g. [url=http://www2.prestel.co.uk/littleton/jminquis.htm]The
> Inquisition, J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia[/url]. I use these
> examples because their twelfth to sixteenth century societies map reasonably
> well in terms of income distribution, individual economic clout, learning
> and political structure to that of most current Muslim (and, for that
> matter, Hindu) societies.
>
> [Hermit] My argument is that Christianity was eventually transformed by its
> believers from a brutal and murderous UTism (viz the Cathars and
> Albigensians) into something superficially gentler, only when its tenets
> came into opposition with its supporters economic, social, and political
> activity - and to an extent depended upon their ability to project military
> capability. In other words, the Christian monotheistic meme was, to an
> extent at least, modified by its environment, and as the environment grew
> more humane, so it too grew more humane or would have been extinguished.
>
> [Hermit] In the same way, the brutal economic realities, worse political
> systems and dehumanizing societies modify the Islamic meme, to make it far
> more virulent than it has been in other times (e.g. Castile or even in the
> US). Either way, the meme is defined by the environment.
>
> [Hermit] As we (the West) have been a major factor in ensuring that the
> economic, social and political systems of Islamic nations match that which
> suits us, the resulting memeplex is, to an equal extent, our responsibility.
> We have played the role of an evolutionary force. The results were
> predictable. We now have to deal with a stronger meme than when we began -
> and opposition to that meme, or an internally driven selection program (as
> in a revolution), will make it stronger yet.
>
> [Hermit] The US appears to me to be throwing the competing and antagonistic
> Christian memeplex up against Islam - which ultimately will probably make
> both worse.
>
> [Hermit] I would have suggested that the correct answer is to prevent
> revolution (which will foster absolutism), encourage growth and to place
> antibiotic "guard bands" around those memepools, which will lead to the
> eventual dominance of the gentler strains of the memeplex through internal
> adaptation and selection. The route to doing this effectively is to make the
> world a somewhat kinder gentler place by implementing a long term program of
> technological aid and exchange, which will force the development of the kind
> of education and society in which any theist religion will eventually become
> irrelevant. As has happened in Europe and will happen in the US.
>
We must indeed have trade and commerce with these countries (not
limited to oil) in order to infect them with modernity and all its
concommitants (secular participatory democracy, religious tolerance,
gender egalitarianism, etc.), and thus ensure our own safety to a
higher degree than present, but in the meantime (and it won't be a short
one, by any means), we must contain those elements which devoutly
desire our destruction, and infiltrate our country and approach our
foreign assets in order to accomplish same by concealing themselves
within a wider, more tolerant community. How we are going to
simultaneously achieve these two goals when their means seem to be
mutually exclusive is one tough nut to crack.
>
> Regards
>
> Hermit
>
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