Memes, Religion, and Realigion

A "meme" is an idea that passes from one person to another. It doesn't matter if the idea is true or false or good or bad; it only needs to be copied to be a meme. Familiarity with memes will help you understand many aspects of humanity. Apparently we evolved a strong aptitude for imitating, for copying and spreading behaviours or information, because this aptitude helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. But this aptitude can sometimes misfire, by turning us into "true believers" of one troublesome meme or another. Youth are especially susceptible to crazy memes, whereas seniors who have survived to their later years are more skeptical and cautious in the acceptance of new ideas.

Some ideas fit well together, but other ideas are incompatible, causing some new ideas to be readily accepted while others are rejected, usually depending on our prior beliefs. A good successful meme is an idea that is more often accepted than rejected, and that either benefits the believer or does no harm. Recipes for lasagna and pizza are simple examples of good successful memes. A bad meme is an idea that gets the believer into trouble (or killed). A really bad meme gets other people killed too. Extreme religious and political beliefs are examples of bad memes. Obviously we should promote good memes, and try to prevent bad memes from spreading. This is easier said than done, of course, but over the years we have learned a few techniques. There is an interesting category of "memes about memes" (meta-memes) that we can exercise to sort out and filter the jumble of memes that we encounter throughout our lives. One basic meta-meme is to question an idea, to analyze it, to carefully test it, before adopting it. After all, for any conceivable good idea there are infinitely more bad ideas, so we really must be selective about the memes that run our lives. Blind imitation can get you killed. A simple example is driving fast, because you see other people driving fast. But notice how many old people drive fast.... very few. They survive to old age because they did not kill themselves when they were younger. So do you want to imitate foolish young people who might soon be dead from recklessness, or would you rather imitate old people who have actually proven they can live a long time?

Unfortunately, to question every idea or behaviour is rather expensive in time and energy. Blind imitation is faster and cheaper. So most of us just think and behave the same as our nearest social groups, namely family, friends, clan, tribe, and nation, rather than get ourselves bogged down in endless analysis and debate. We let evolution sort out winning memes from losers, as we play the part of mindless expendable pawns in natural experiments lasting generations. Notice that a meme can succeed and persist in a human culture even though it is harmful to many humans (just think about smoking or slavery). Much grief can happen before a majority of humans finally realize that some particular idea is bad rather than good.

Every religion is a "memeplex", a complex of memes that mutually support each other. A successful religion has believers working to preserve and expand their number. Many people teach religion to their children, because if religion worked for themselves, then it should work okay for their children too, shouldn't it? But problems develop when incompatible religions collide. Some religions are intolerant of other religions. That can cause all kinds of grief, maybe even war. We want all religions to be compatible and to be good memeplexes, then no one loses and maybe everyone wins. If your religion is causing you problems with your neighbours, then maybe your religion is a bad memeplex, and you need to find a better religion. Or your neighbours need to. But even if your religion seems to cause no problems for you or anyone else, how can you be sure it is correct and not based on fiction? Maybe it is holding you back from greater success or happiness, because you haven't thought critically about it, nor reviewed alternatives.

A religion need not be a package deal; we can dare to delete undesirable memes from the package, and promote just the memes we believe are good. Some particularly suspicious ideas often strongly promoted by traditional religions include: (1) blind faith is good; (2) any other religion is bad; (3) aggression against people of other religions is acceptable; (4) our book of ancient scripture is absolutely 100% correct; (5) believers must obey and not question religious authority; and (6) avoid contact with nonbelievers. There are many other religious ideas that deserve scrutiny. Realize that much of any religious memeplex is devoted to preserving and promoting the religion, and might not be optimized for maximizing human happiness!  Throughout human history, philosophers have studied many aspects of religion. Like many other human professions, philosophy improves with time, and so the scrutiny of religion has become particularly interesting in recent years. There is much to think about.

Is your religion (or any other) based on truth, or fiction? What is religion? Why do so many of us have religion? What need does it satisfy, besides filling our minds? Maybe we need guidance for how to live? Or maybe we want to know why we are here? Or what comes after death? Or we want help to raise happy successful offspring? Or we want to preach? Our needs are many, as are the number of religions. Could we deliberately design a new religion that is more compatible with modern realities? That provides the apparent psychological and social benefits of traditional religions but fewer of the problems? Maybe. To start, we could ground it in reality, to be more persuasive.

Introducing Realigion

The universe is a fascinating place, full of variety. But something with even more variety is our endless stream of ideas to explain the universe. It's amazing, though, how we learn that some explanations don't fit with the real world (they are not supported by any evidence that we can gather). Some of our ideas are just plain silly. But fortunately, we throw out the faulty ideas, and just keep the good ones that improve our understanding of this marvellous universe, that improve our lives, and that lead to more fascinating evidence and more neat theories to test.

The evolution of ideas mimics the evolution of life... just as a soup of primeval organic chemicals came together billions of years ago to start the chain of life that evolved into intelligent human beings, now we humans are feverishly putting ideas together, testing them, and adding the best ones to our evolving knowledge of the universe. We have learned that all life is interconnected in complex ecologies, and that many of our initial ideas about exploiting the resources of the planet were foolish. We learn from our mistakes, and sometimes we even learn without making mistakes. And life and the world just get better and better, as we accumulate good ideas and abandon bad ideas.

To where will lead the progressive evolution of life and ideas? Microscopic single-celled life has already evolved into worldwide ecologies and intelligent humans with a complex planetary civilization. But evolution of life and civilization has not stopped, and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the drive for change now seems to be bred into both biology and human society. There is something of the explorer in all of us, because our ancestors who explored change came out ahead of those who did not. Evolution will continue, despite occasional silly attempts to deny it. Humans appear to be especially interesting creatures, a product of both the well-known phenomenon of biological genetic evolution plus the lesser-understood phenomenon of memetic evolution (which works much faster). Lately we are adding tool and machine evolution into the mix. Where we all go will be very interesting to see, especially because we are intimately involved in the process and might be able to influence the outcome.

The religious aspect comes when we speculate into the distant past and the far future. How did life originate? And where will evolution take it? Will life and intelligence develop or spread throughout the universe? Will human civilization spread to the stars, perhaps merging with alien civilizations? What sort of collective intelligence and wisdom will result? Are there any other significant intelligences out there? And what is intelligence anyway? If there really is a "god", might we someday say hello, as a peer? Does "god" evolve? The only way to find out, short of a divine answer to our queries, is to climb the evolutionary ladder, to keep asking questions and searching for answers. Luckily, it just comes naturally to us, and as a side effect, life gets better and better.

This, then, is the basis for a realistic religion, called "realigion". It is all about observing and understanding the intricacies and implications of evolution in the past, present, and future. A beauty of realigion is that you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Just observing is enough: you can be a spectator, watching the fascinating universe evolve into incredible complexity and potentially awesome intelligence. Or you can "worship" by taking an active role in discovery and exploitation of knowledge, in which case we will get to where we are going even faster. The impatient among us will explore and force the evolutionary process, by finding good tricks that will take us to higher realms of knowledge and wisdom and existence. Computer automation and networking are two recent good tricks that accelerate the evolution of ideas. The scientific method is an older example, still supremely valuable, for it encourages inquiry to separate useful fact from misleading fiction.

Another beauty of the "evolving universe" realigion is abundant evidence. You don't have to accept anyone's word or interpretations, because you can examine the raw evidence yourself. And the evidence keeps evolving, keeping realigion from becoming boring. Other religions evolve too, which provides even more subject matter for realigious study!

A common goal of all realigious people will be better understanding of the universe and all its inhabitants. Knowledge of truth, the way things really are, helps us to find and implement successful strategies for getting whatever it is that we each want. The more we understand how the universe does operate and can operate, the more efficiently we can use the resources available to us to improve our lives. A relevant good trick, a strategy that we have learned, is specialization: each of us focusing our talents on what we do best while trading in win-win fashion with others to distribute the wealth thereby created. Learning and discovering similar valuable good tricks is an enticing aspect of realigion, for any religion without benefit would be a waste of time. The principles of realigion could be taught by realigious specialists, akin to preachers. If they do a good job, then their audiences should benefit.

Realigion is not inherently anti-God, but neither does it assume the existence of any god until such can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. It is really up to believers in god(s) to find credible evidence to persuade non-believers, if persuasion is important to the believers. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Realigion counsels that we must work to separate fact from fantasy, because known fact leads to predictable results whereas believed fantasy can lead to very bad mistakes. Fantasy has no bounds, it is a product of imagination unconstrained by the laws of the universe. Reality is plenty complicated enough to deal with; let's not make life more dangerous than it already is.

Here is a mission statement (a prayer to ourselves and to each other) to promote formation of realigious communities:

It is so easy to be wrong about nearly everything.
Let us work to discern reality from fiction,
so we can benefit from true knowledge.
The more that we know of reality,
the more that we can shape it to our own liking.


You Decide

This prototypical realigion memeplex is offered as a modern alternative to traditional religions. Perhaps realigion will do some good by displacing dangerous memes. Adopt this realigion as is, or modify it for consistency with your other beliefs. Whatever you do, beware of bad memes. Never force an idea onto anyone, but instead seek then offer supporting evidence. Curiosity and critical thinking are our primary tools for understanding and exploiting reality.

If these ideas appeal to you, then please pass them on. If you can express them more clearly, please do so. We are working to make the universe a better place. Our work starts with good ideas, clearly communicated.

For more about memes and alternative religions, visit:

You can also type a few keywords into any web search engine, to find a whole lot more.

Lloyd Harrison Whitling has edited and illustrated another version of this Realigion essay .  Mr. Whitling is also promoting a memeplex similar to realigion, which he calls colligion, explained at his website  http://www.atheistlloyd.com/Page2.html .

Realigion might be especially appealing to the community of Brights, people who have a naturalistic world view free of supernatural and mystical elements.  Check out http://www.the-brights.net/  for more info.

Follow-up

Like prior religions, realigion might spread more efficiently and benefit more people if organized participation can be developed, i.e., by church or temple or study group. This author is unaware of any existing realigion groups, but there is nothing to stop an enthusiast from trying to organize something. Whoever does the work gets the glory or satisfaction or money or whatever other benefits might accrue. This need not be a centralized effort. Decentralization with friendly competition for audiences might provide checks and balances to keep realigion in the real world.

Maybe realigion is already slowly spreading under other names. Projects such as Church of Virus, colligion, realigion, and the Brights all bring up the question of what do we call these non-religious philosophies? Truth seeking? Critical thinking? Bright stuff?

A possible strategy towards loosely organized realigion could be the development of a "Sunday School" curriculum, consisting of a collection of independent one-hour lectures (sermons?) given by enthusiasts on various topics, supported by informational and coaching materials distributed through the Internet. Topics could range widely, from the basics of evolutionary theory, to the sophisticated good tricks discovered by man or nature to take life to new heights. An objective might be the imparting of accumulated general knowledge to wider audiences, who would benefit (and so be motivated to attend) by the knowledge so gained. Speakers could reasonably be expected to earn some money for their efforts. (Hey all you underemployed websurfer bums: maybe you could make a well-paying job out of this!)

A related to-do item for developing organized realigion would be preparation and promotion of a reference book (a Bible or Quran competitor). Such scriptures have been theorized as being of significant worth to the success of religious memeplexes. The Book of Realigion either has yet to be written, or has yet to become popular. There are doubtless many effective tricks (memes) that can be copied from traditional religions. We want to craft a formidable new memeplex that combines the best memes of science and religion, to help humanity get a firm grip on reality. It is not sufficient for one author to admire their own work; the realigion memeplex must replicate to be successful.

First drafted in 1990 by Peter Ruhe; then updated a few times since then, most recently on 1-October-2007.
Not copyrighted; if you like this essay then please store your own copy in case this website disappears.

Many thanks to all the smart and curious critical thinkers out there who share their ideas!

End.