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Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

Passionating.

I see religions mostly as Conway's game of life - blips of colors fighting for territory using various ways, sometimes removing the competition, sometimes behing destroyed by competition, sometimes dying by themselves, etc.

It's like competition in a soul market :-)

But in what they do, they seem push humanity forward, to give a reason, a hope.

Yet I would be worried if a religion achieved dominant status (monopoly) in a way that could be used to eradicate newcomers and innovation.

We already have an oligopoly - see the problems it makes on a worldwide scale.

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> But in what they do, they seem push humanity forward, to give a reason, a hope.

I'd argue that the surviving religions are more like the strongest viruses of the mind, not really the most useful mutations for society. You could look at the progress of societies and religions as the co-evolution of hosts and parasites, rather than of a single species acquiring useful new features :)

A good parasite never kills its host.

I'd say the truth is somewhere in between. Religions were a useful adaption. But after being supplanted by more useful mind viruses (like philosophy, which is itself becoming outdated; or formal justice systems), then their utility no longer mattered - just their ability to cling on.

Philosophy predates a fair amount of religion, and actually encompasses it. And by definition it can't become outdated (as it's the pursuit of knowledge).

> A good parasite never kills its host.

That depends very much on how easy it is to find new hosts.

The formal justice system is based on the Talmud. It's filled with "case studies" of edge cases that were used to set precedent of interpretation.

Because what we really need right now is a "formal justice systems are a Jewish conspiracy" meme going around.

That is the basis of my favorite book, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

From Wikipedia: The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).

>>But in what they do, they seem push humanity forward, to give a reason, a hope.

Do they? How can you tell? Maybe they actually slow humanity's progress.

Look at societies that haven't transitioned from tribal kinship identities and belief systems. Their lifestyle has changed little in thousands of years.

That doesn't imply anything positive about religion, just that some tribes with and without "religion" reached a stable lifestyle early and aren't motivated to progress.

It implies religion was a necessary condition for progress.

No, it implies that religion was a sufficient condition for progress.

http://faculty.uncfsu.edu/jyoung/necessary_and_sufficient_co...

Then show a counter example without religion in the equation.

> But in what they do, they seem push humanity forward, to give a reason, a hope.

They were the best way to do this in the past, but we have better reasons to hope now: The world is comprehensible and our efforts to understand it meaningfully improve our lives, leading to meaningful improvements in our selves. We are, on the whole, less violent now than we were through most of our history, and there is reason to hope this will continue.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=history-and...

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