Re: understanding neuroscience

J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Sun, 5 Sep 1999 17:59:37 -0700

Greg Burch wrote,
>The same sort of thing will happen to me from my own Catholic upbringing,
>especially if I encounter the full blown "Magic Show" (as I used to call
the
>Mass when I was an altar boy); it's almost like some kind of weird drug
rush.

Reading this leaves me with the impression that in some ways a Catholic upbringing must feel similar to a childhood experience of intense psychic abuse. Would you think it disparaging if someone called you a "recovering Catholic"?

>Interestingly, the memories don't fade for many people, but just go into a
>dormant state. I think a big part of the resurgence in religious fervor in
>America now can be attributed to the reactivation of religious memes
>implanted in childhood among the Boomers by life situations they're just
now
>encountering: Parenting and middle age career and physiological stress. A
>whole panoply of programming was implanted in them, just waiting to be
>activated by these predictable events in the stages of a typical human
life.

Dormant memories sound vaguely reminiscent of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
I wonder how far toward Armageddon the resurgence in religious fervor (and religious memes) will take us. Do you wonder how much dormant programming might influence Homo sapiens to retreat from a technological Singularity, or from an extropic Type I civilization? I view religious memes as analogous to infectious disease. Some people display greater immunity than others.