H

uman beings have evolved as pattern-seeking animals. We perceive sequences of events and we see shapes and objects seemingly organized in particular ways, and we tend to want to find a reason for that often-apparent level of organization. We see random sequences around us, and we have devised mental mechanisms that allow us to see them organized in patterns. This mechanism helped our ancestors better cope with their natural surroundings and potential dangers such as a pair of menacing eyes staring from within the foliage, but did not equip them with the tools to discern when a pattern actually exists and when those patterns just seem to exist. Thus, we think we see faces on Mars, dogs and dragons in the night sky, or the image of the Virgin Mary on the glass windows of an office building reflecting a distorted image of a nearby tree. 

The individuals that learned how to cope with their environment were the ones that survived long enough to reproduce. That way, they managed to pass along important and useful information to their offspring in the form of orally transmitted tales. As a consequence of this, we have evolved as story-telling animals that pass along our perception of reality to our offspring. We tend to create myths to weave together these apparently purposely created shapes, patterns or sequences of unexplained phenomena in an effort to assign meaning to them. We have evolved a belief engine which has given us the tools to look at nature and find explanations for everything, ranging from why the sun seemingly rises every morning and apparently revolves around us, to why it rains, where we come from and where we go to after we die. These beliefs—and many more—are grounded on a long tradition and history in which generation after generation passed them along to their offspring. They gave people comfort and sometimes helped them survive by making other people aware of dangerous animals or places. Most importantly, they created a sense of community for those people that shared the same beliefs, thus making them stronger as a group in the face of a hostile environment. 

The beliefs held by those people better adapted to stay alive until they had offspring were the beliefs that in turn survived. Since people like to tell and hear stories, they told them to other people around the fire and taught them to their offspring, who in turn told them to their own offspring. Some of those beliefs were instrumental in their survival. The collective set of practical ideas together with beliefs in the supernatural in these primitive societies in time turned into organized religions.

A religion is nothing more than a self-perpetuating delusion. It is the sum of a large array of self-replicating ideas called memes. A meme, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is “An element of a culture or a system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation.” To this definition we should add inculcation, as memes are transmitted and propagated by imitation as well as inculcation. A group of memes that “work together” towards a “common” goal, such as a religion, a constitution or a set of social norms such as the “rules” of courtship is called a memeplex. Memes are a form of thought contagion because they change our conventional understanding of human beings as capable of creating original ideas and/or acquiring them, to the notion that ideas acquire people. Because of the pernicious effects of religions, as well as their memetic makeup, they can be considered a virus of the mind.

A successful religious meme needs to use some or all of the following mechanisms in order to acquire a host:

1. Promise heaven in exchange for belief.
2. Threaten eternal punishment in hell for disbelief.
3. Position the believer as superior to those who believe in other, “false” memes (“the chosen people”, “the true religion”, etc.).
4. Create an immune response to contradicting memes by claiming that faith is superior to reason, thus disabling the faculties of disbelief.
5. Establish itself unequivocally as the “One True Meme”. Some sort of “holy” book accomplishes this. The book contains a circular self-referential argument in which the book’s authority comes from a higher source of universal truth that established that meme as the “One True Meme”. Because the meme contains statements that the source of universal truth has approved that meme we can therefore conclude that what the meme says is true.

Religion has been, and still is, a driving force in society and the source of much cruelty and abuse. It has been, and still is, the “opium of the masses”. But not every religion is pernicious to the same degree, and not everything in a religious memeplex has a negative or pernicious consequence. Religion tends to teach ethics and morals, which of course is a good thing, but they can also be taught outside of it. Historically religions have conflicted with science, with democracy, and with any other form of free thought. Given the fact that it is unrealistic to eradicate religions by outlawing them, as evidenced by the experiment in the former Soviet Union, it is imperative to find other means by which people can be turned away from belief in the supernatural and dogmatic religions.

The solution is a paradigm shift in education. It is imperative to use education in a greatly improved form, assisted by the use of the science of memes. Education today, and in particular early age education is misguided because the system is focused on knowledge and not on brain development and on learning how to think. The current education system fails because it generally allows children to develop their rational capabilities in a haphazard way, if at all. It relies entirely on parents to teach children how to think, which is a mistake as parents are rarely equipped to teach that and seldom if ever they attempt to do so. It also leaves the child’s mental development to the vagaries of parental mechanical meme transmission, or worse, by religious indoctrination from an early age when a child is most vulnerable as they have not yet come out of their “magical thinking” stage. A child that has not been protected or immunized against religious memes—and most children will be mercilessly exposed to them—will be infected by them and in most cases will be for life. This type of early-age exposure to religious indoctrination is a form of mental abuse.

The education system needs to be radically altered in order to prevent this from happening and to create a better society. The system needs to be focused in the early brain development phase on teaching children how to think and to make rational and critical thinking an automatic process. By the use of games a child’s brain needs to be “molded” to automatically use inductive and deductive reasoning. As the child grows they need to learn how to think critically. Asking questions and approaching presented positions skeptically should also be an automatic process. As they mature they need to be exposed to an epidemiology of ideas to learn how memes propagate as outlined above, so they will know how to identify pernicious thought contagions and be prepared to reject them. A child has to be exposed to mathematics from an early age in an entertaining manner so as to prevent the much too prevalent math aversion and ignorance so common today.