Re: Extropianism as a World Meme
Chris Hind (bholat@earthlink.net)
Mon, 02 Sep 1996 11:17:00 -0700
>I think it will benefit of each of us to spread the Extropian memes to all
>people on Earth. Not necessarily to have everyone identify themselves as
>"Extropian," but to have everyone working dilligently on increasing the amount
>of intelligence, creativity, happiness, etc. in their lives; all of the
>Extropian Values. To infect someone with a meme, the meme must have qualities
>which help it to flourish in the individual's current memetic system. There
>are no "one meme fits all" in memetic competition. To really be effective at
>spreading our memes, we need to gain a deep understanding of people's belief
>systems, so that we can design memes that work WITH their belief systems, to
>transform them into something more Extropian. It would be helpful for many of
>us to infiltrate various major world religions, gain an understanding of the
>people's psychology, their belief systems and so forth. Then it would be good
>to write a few books, aimed at the people in the particular religion, written
>as though they are by an "insider" of the religion, but with the Extropian
>Values seamlessly mixed in with the traditional religious memes. One way to
>do this is to highly emphasize the memes of the religion which are the most
>Extropian (such as, "God helps those who help themselves.") and ignore or
>downplay those which aren't. The books need to be very compelling to the
>people in these religions so that they become widely read by the members of
>the religion and deeply embedded.
Even before you said it I WAS THINKING THE SAME EXACT THING! You hit it
right on the money. The "extropian companion to christianity". I should
myself write a book on this if I have time considering I was raised in a
house where my mom taught a bible study/fellowship and is a church secretary
and my whole family is heavily christian.
But you cannot show christians blatantly obvious facts that slap down
religion because they will then take the blind faith defense. I once used
the tactic against my mother in that GOD couldn't have created the entire
population from adam and eve because for about 2 generations after them
there would be major genetic defects from brother-sister and cousin
relationships leading to something nowhere near human due to the gene pool
being so small. But my mother replied that I had to take it on faith that
GOD prevented those birth defects. HOW BLATANTLY STUPID! So I replied, "What
happens if you blind fold yourself and run through a forest? You'd slam into
a tree! now thats blind faith for you!". Or heres another example try
guessing on a math problem, guess what? I bet you'll likely get a wrong
answer. Blind faith is an obvious sign of a memetic infection.