This isn’t close to true. Look at the timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war
> The moment memes switched over from religion to politics as primary content seems to have been the French Revolution, I can't think of a time before that when people killed each other over political ideals.
Uh. What?
I'm not sure if it's true, but I see what they mean. A distinction between killing over power, and killing over ideas. I can see the attraction of the idea that killing over ideas is a modern phenomenon, although it's probably not entirely true (in either direction -- most wars over ideas are perhaps really about power anyway... but is couching it as a war over ideas a modern phenomenon? Probably still not entirely, but there might be something to it...)
False. Christianity got proselytism from its immediate parent, Second Temple era Judaism, which was also a proselytizing religion (or, at least, had proselytizing subsets.)
Later, including modern, Judaism is mostly non-proselytizing, sure, but that's not how it always was.
This has been a thing since at least the Roman empire? Pretty sure that the Athens-Sparta wars were also at least in part over ideological differences. Probably much earlier too, but I'm not a historian and can't recall any from the top of my head.
Btw, to say that the French revolution was primarily over political ideals and not (say) a power struggle between competing elites or a public revolt over economic circumstances seems like a huge oversimplification of a conflict that took over a decade.
My read on the comment was that people killed each other for political reasons prior to the time of Christ, and maybe even religious reasons, but that conversion wasn't a stated goal. This aligns in general with the assumption that while the religious was universal, Christianity is a peculiar mixture of inclusive and exclusive claims that redraw the boundaries between people primarily on a faith test rather than political or racial tests.
One could argue any sort of idea is itself inherently a virus; once your mind understands it, it "clicks" into your head, and now you think about, and use it all the time -- spreading it to others.
It's a function of modern language/living, I believe.
We should all go back to clicking and clacking at one another in various tones and pitches.
click clack click click
clack clack clack
click clack click click
I vehemently disagree. I think it's good to "spread" ideas that you think are valuable, but without being a zealot/activist about it. On the contrary if you've stumbled upon some idea, philosophy, etc. that is valuable to you personally, and you decide to secretly keep it only to yourself, that seems a bit selfish.
I think a good first step is to reject browbeating, bullying, pile ons, and other tactics used to force ideas upon people. Another thing that needs to be rejected is the type of idea sharing that mainly generates heat (stokes outrage). So maybe in that sense I think "sharing memes" might be counter productive.
But sharing ideas, philosophies, etc. (religious, political, scientific, or otherwise) human-to-human at a personal level seems valuable to me - at the very least it keeps the marketplace of ideas (and therefore idea discovery) healthy without the heat of stoked outrage.
While I do agree that this seem to be very correlated with the montoheistic religions (wrote about exactly that here):
> Monotheism makes it really hard to consider the arguments of the other side because it doles out the addictive sweet nectar of moral superiority
https://piszek.com/2022/01/10/monotheism/
I don't agree with your conclusion that this is something you have to fight. We can do exactly what they did before the spread of montheism - live in the world where it is perfectly normal to have multiple points of view or even value frameworks. Rome thrived in that setting.
The choice between us vs them is itself an illusion. You don't have to subscribe to the entire package, but then you don't get access to that righteousness Fix
The credit would be misplaced. I'm pretty sure by the time Jesus was born, there had been an almost incalculable number of conquests and pogroms for some deity or the other.
The Wars of the Roses (England, 1455-1487) was primarily political rather than religious. It was caused by a succession crisis, rival political units and changes in the structure of feudalism.
The numerous wars in Rome between rival emperors had very little to do with religion.
Yeah, Christianity does seem to be the first religion that asserts it has universal good news that transcends national boundary, religious affiliation, race, etc. It is not the first religion to make universal claims, of course—Judaism asserts that Yahweh, for example, is the only true God—but it does appear to be the first religion that is specifically anti-tribe. In this sense, Christianity is incredibly inclusive. At the same time, Christianity appears as an incredibly exclusive religion, too: monotheism is nothing if not exclusive.
One might argue that the reason for its emphasis on proselytizing is two-fold: one, because adherents really did believe it was good news and naturally would spread it, and two, because it was a powerless religion. Once clearly distinguished from Judaism, it enjoyed none of the famous Roman tolerance for the other monotheistic religion and was sporadically persecuted until the time of Constantine.
The question of religion and war is an interesting one. Politics and religion were inseparable prior to Christianity, and it is hard to imagine a world in which they are separable without Christianity. The idea that you can separate Caesar from God stems from a famous interaction with...Jesus.[1] (Caesar is literal in the text, of course, but a metonym in later interpretation.) Of course it took a very long time for political theory to develop to the extent you could imagine a country in which church and state were separate. On the other hand, it's also hard to imagine a world in which you could plausibly go to war to convert someone to your religion without such inclusive claims as Christianity makes: war likely would have retained its religious underpinnings, of course, but wouldn't be characterized with evangelistic fervor.
Can you have one without the other? I'm not entirely sure. That is to say, I'm not sure we could have a society in which we could meaningfully separate church and state without simultaneously running the risk that we'd have religious war.
> For example, science doesn't try to make you into a spreader; it's content to have you do science.
Do you see a meaningful difference between "doing science" and "spreading science"? Do you have opinions about the phrase "believe the science"?
[1] See, e.g., https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22%3A17...
It's germane to the conversation that the general tenor of the time, at least as recorded in the New Testament (see, i.a., https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%201:6&vers...) was that God's Messiah would be a military ruler and re-establish Jewish dominance.