Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than their pretensions to be the only religious people.
– Jean Guehenno
By the time Jesus was born, polytheism was still widespread, but monotheism had a solid stronghold among the Jews. In spite of being a minority view, the Yahweh meme had evolved all of the critical features that made Yahweh into a viable monotheistic deity. Let us do a quick review:
With these memes in place, the Yahweh meme was poised to take over Western civilization.
The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear.
– Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)
We've already claimed that the genesis of the Intolerance meme was one of the most important ideas in the history of the world. The murder and destruction justified by King Josiah in the name of Yahweh (2 Chronicles) was bad, but Josiah's intolerance pales by comparison to the acts of intolerance that followed in the next two millennia.
Ironically, the Intolerance meme's next big moment in history worked against the Christians: The Christians' monotheism offended the Romans. Recall that Jews and Christians refused to acknowledge or pay homage to other gods. This really irked the Romans, because they equated this with disrespect to the empire. Nero, who was probably crazy, took advantage of the widespread dislike of Christians by blaming them for the great fire (64 AD) that destroyed most of Rome, a fire he may have set himself. Nero diverted suspicion by accusing the Christians, which triggered the first wave of murder and torture of Christians.
The systematic persecutions of Christians began with Maximin in the second century, and continued for the next 150 years. Christians were burned, crucified, fed to lions, wrapped in fresh hides to be torn apart by ravenous dogs ... all of the horrid and cruel methods the Romans could think of. The last and most extensive of these persecutions was the war on monotheism itself, waged by Diocletian and Galerius near the beginning of the fourth century.
But in spite of this long and sad chapter in Roman history, the ultimate irony is that more Christians were killed by other Christians after the Roman persecution stopped. In 313 AD, Galerius decriminalized Christianity, and two years later, the Emperors Constantine I and Licineus issued the Edict of Milan, which went even further, declaring that the Empire was neutral with respect to religion. This may have seemed like a good thing to the Christians, but it turned out to be a disaster. Anyone could worship any god, and a Christian could join any of the hundreds of Christian sects that had sprung up since the death of Jesus. Christian "orthodoxy" (literally, "right thought") was taking root, and Christians were well acquainted with the Intolerance meme from their Jewish heritage They began to persecute and kill one another in record numbers, just for believing the wrong version of Christianity. In the century that followed the Edict of Milan, more Christians died at the hands of other Christians than the Romans killed in a century and a half of persecutions.
The Intolerance meme continued its work down through the centuries. The Crusades saw wanton massacres of "pagans" by Christians, beginning with the First Crusade, in which the entire population of Jerusalem was murdered, man, woman and child:
"No one ever saw or heard of such slaughter of pagan people, for funeral pyres were formed from them like pyramids, and no one knows their number except God alone."
– Gesta Francorum ("The Deeds of the Franks"), a Latin chronicle of the First Crusade, around 1100 AD, anonymous.
The Christians justified these holy wars against Jews and Muslims by taking a chapter from the Jew's history: They claimed they were "God's New Chosen People."
On top of the outright wars, torture and murder in the name of Yahweh, there was also the suppression of "heretical" knowledge. The most famous case is the trial, conviction, and incarceration (commuted to house arrest) of Galileo Galilei by the Roman Catholic Church for contradicting the account of Genesis in the Bible, when he demonstrated that the Earth orbits around the Sun. This tradition, the suppression of knowledge and inquiry, continues full strength even today, with modern Creationists from America's ultra-conservative churches, who try to prevent the teaching of science (evolution in particular) in America's schools. Knowledge and truth are the enemy of the Intolerance meme, and it has adapted religious and political methods to fight back.
Some of the largest migrations of humans in history were justified by the Intolerance meme. American schoolchildren know King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, as forward-thinking visionaries who funded Columbus in his "discovery" of America. But American History schoolbooks often, when telling the story of Columbus, omit the fact that Isabella and Ferdinand also presided over the Spanish Inquisition, and omit the fact that in that same year, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella drove all of the Jews out of Spain, confiscated all their worldly possessions (mostly because many Jews were wealthy and the Monarchy was broke), and forced them to flee in complete destitution. One of the few countries to offer refuge to the Jews was the Ottoman Empire. In some ways, the Jews were lucky – they avoided the Spanish Inquisition, which prosecuted approximately 150,000 Christians, of whom about 3,000 to 5,000 were actually executed.
The early history of America is largely a result of the Intolerance meme. The Puritans were a persecuted Christian minority in England, at odds with the "official" Christian Church of England doctrine, so they fled to America to establish their own Puritan town. Ironically, the Puritans, and other groups that followed, in spite of being victims of persecution, were no more tolerant than their former persecutors – once they arrived on the shores of America, they were quick to impose their own version of Christianity on everyone in sight.
Historically, the Muslims were more often the victims of Christian intolerance than the perpetrators. In fact, the period of Moorish rule in Iberia prior to the Catholic takeover, was a Golden Age of tolerance. Muslims, Jews and Christians all lived side by side, worshipped in freedom, learned about one another's culture and religion, and engaged in deep and thoughtful discourse. The intercourse between cultures resulted in fantastic advances in many areas, including mathematics, philosophy, and theology. But that Golden Age of Tolerance died out with the rise and dominance of the Catholic Church in the region.
In spite of their early tolerance, some groups that claim to be Muslim have picked up the Intolerance meme, just like their Christian and Jewish predecessors, and they've learned it all too well. Modern events, such as the destruction of Buddhist shrines in Afghanistan by the Taliban government, and the civil war between the Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims in Iraq following the destruction of the Iraqi government by American forces, show that the Muslims are perfectly capable of incorporating the Intolerance meme into their theology, in spite of the teachings of Mohammad, who taught that all faiths should be respected equally.
A full accounting of the tragedies justified by the Intolerance meme would fill thousands and thousands of books. Murder, torture, poverty, wars by the dozens and hundreds, forced migrations ... the list of atrocities is appalling.
When discussing these acts of murder, torture, etc., it is difficult to know whether they were caused by religious intolerance, or merely justified after the fact. For example, Isabella and Ferdinand might have conducted something like the Spanish Inquisition even without the Church's backing. The underlying motive was power and wealth, and they may have used Catholicism as a cover-up for crimes they would have committed anyway. Stalin's reign of terror makes Ferdinand and Isabella look like amateurs, and Stalin was an atheist.
Some acts of intolerance are plainly in support of the Religion Virus, such as the suppression of Galileo's discovery that the Earth isn't the center of the universe. Such knowledge threatened both the orthodox view, as well as the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. After all, if they were wrong about a geocentric universe, what else might be challenged? But generally speaking, it is difficult or impossible to separate cause and effect. Because of this, I am careful to use the word "justified" when talking about the Intolerance meme. It may be that "caused" is a more correct term in some cases, but we can't know.
Before we leave this topic, it is important to remind ourselves why such a negative meme could become integrated into the memeplex of the world's great religions. The "Golden Age of Tolerance" in Iberia under the Moors illustrates the brutal truth about the Intolerance meme. Which religion dominates Spain and Portugal today? The Roman Catholic Church. It was the religion that (in the 1400s) had the most well-developed Intolerance meme. The Moors let Jews and Christians worship right alongside the Muslims. Although that may seem like a wise, enlightened and moral way to run a country, it doesn't spread Islam. By contrast, when the Catholics took over, with their strong Intolerance meme, they wiped out the other religions.
It doesn't matter whether Isabella and Ferdinand were right or wrong, moral or immoral, or whether the Intolerance meme caused or merely justified their actions. All that matters is that the Roman Catholic Church gained, and Islam and Judaism lost. The Roman Catholics memeplex became more numerous, the Judaism and Islamic memeplexes became fewer. Catholicism had more parishioners, the Jews and Muslims were killed or fled, along with the memes for Judaism and Islam. The Muslim's "tolerance meme" wasn't a survivor, so it died out, whereas the Catholic's Intolerance meme was taught to the next generation, because it survived.
This is survival of the fittest at its simplest and best. The Spanish Inquisition was a terrible, immoral tragedy, but from an evolutionary point of view, it was a success.
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.
– Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
In addition to his preaching and letters, St. Paul started one of the most crucial ideas to the spread of the Christian religion: Paul argued that the teachings of Jesus, and the power of Yahweh, should be shared with the goyim, not just the Jews. This was a radical departure from Jewish tradition, and offended the other disciples of Jesus who believed that Jesus' teachings were just for the Jews, God's chosen people:
Then Paul and Barnabas answered them boldly: "We had to speak the word of God to you first. Since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles."
– Acts 13:46
In our chapter on Religion's Infancy, we studied the Globalization meme, which converted Yahweh from a regional god of war, into a global god whom the Jews could worship anywhere in the world. This was a critical mutation for the Yahweh memeplex, because it allowed Judaism to break out of its ancestral homeland. But although Yahweh had become geographically global, he was still ethnically local – only the Jews were his "Chosen People," so there was no reason to convince non-Jews to worship Yahweh. Yahweh was "stuck in a rut," with a limited audience.
The Apostle Paul changed that. Saint Paul was a Jew and a Roman citizen who studied under the well-known Rabbi Gamaliel, and was engaged in the persecution of Christians. He was headed to Damascus, apparently to eradicate a Christian community, when he had a blinding vision of Jesus and was converted to Christianity, becoming one of the most important preachers in Christianity's history. In addition to his preaching, Paul was a literate man and wrote many letters to Christians, answering their questions and correcting their misunderstandings, letters which are now one of the most important parts of the New Testament of the Christian Bible.
Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham. The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: "All nations will be blessed through you." So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
– Galatians 3:7-9
The Globalization meme, which previously had expanded the worship of Yahweh worldwide, had once again mutated, this time allowing it to spread outside of the Jewish people. Yahweh (the Christian version, that is) became a truly universal god-memeplex, a god who could be worshipped anywhere, by anyone.
The benefits of this mutation of the Yahweh memeplex (that is, the Christian version of the Yahweh memeplex) are obvious: The Christian version of the Yahweh meme is worshipped by far more people than the Jewish version. Its ecological niche (the "place" where the meme can survive – a topic we will study at length in the next chapter) was vastly expanded by this mutation.
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
1 Timothy 2:11-14
Many cultures have a much more open and casual attitude towards pleasures such as sex, wine and leisure than Western civilization. For example, some Polynesian cultures allowed teenagers to engage in sex freely. Ancient Egyptian language appears to have no word for "virgin," as virginity was not an important concept. Pre-Christian pagan religions throughout the Roman Empire considered sex to be an essential part of their worship, honoring the fertility and pleasures that the gods had bestowed; ritual sex was common, and often an essential part of worship.
The Christians who first arrived in the South Seas may have thought Polynesians were utterly without morals, but they were mistaken. The Polynesians had strong moral codes, and (for example) were expected to be monogamous once married; sexual freedom was only the prerogative of teenagers.
The Jews believe that sex and marriage are holy and divine. Rabbis are expected to marry, to have a respectful and happy sex life with their wives, become fathers, and set an example for other men and women in the community. The Jews of Jesus' time believed that it was sinful to avoid pleasures like sex and wine. God did not want humans to suffer, nor was suffering the way to find God. Rather, God had made pleasures for humans to enjoy. To avoid these pleasures was to deny God's gifts.
To the Jews, the idea of inherited sin is abhorrent, and against the word of Yahweh as taught in Deuteronomy:
Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin.
– Deuteronomy 24:16
The Greeks, especially Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, formulated a rational approach to ethics (discussed briefly in the Godly Origin of Morals section earlier) that had a profound influence on the world. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC) is the most complete and well-known work describing Greek Ethics, and is a towering intellectual achievement. Reading it, one wonders how, over two thousand years later, we haven't come close to the inherently moral standards laid down by the Greeks.
The Christians, in the guise of Tertullian of Carthage, followed by Saint Augustine, turned the natural morality of pagan societies, and the Rational Ethics of the Greeks, on its head. The Guilt meme began with the vilification of all natural human pleasures and desires, sex in particular. Tertullian created the term original sin, the idea that we inherit sin from Adam and Eve's transgressions, but Tertullian's influence was limited because of his truly extreme views. But Augustine, who became a Catholic bishop, picked up Tertullian's idea of original sin, and turned it into a powerful meme.
Augustine's revulsion with his own sexuality can be seen in his explanation of the male erection. Instead of considering it a healthy, natural reaction that a man experiences upon seeing a desirable woman, Augustine decided that the male erection was the flesh revolting against God's will. That is, the human soul naturally wants to be chaste (why? Augustine doesn't say), but the flesh revolts into sin, and is disgusting. Augustine carried this revulsion of sex to an extreme: All sex of any sort outside of marriage was sinful, and even within marriage sex was regrettable, and was only permitted for the procreation of children. This is particularly ironic given Augustine's ten-year relationship with his true love, a common country girl, who bore him his son, but whom he was forced to abandon when his mother insisted on a society marriage. Some argue that the heartbroken Augustine's deep anguish over this lost love may have caused him to reject love and sex; that as a post-facto justification for his loss, Augustine formulated his anti-sex philosophy that became entrenched in Christianity.
Augustine also laid down the theological foundation for reviling women, by arguing that Eve's transgression was of such a magnitude that one's own death couldn't pay for it. This leads to the conclusion that women are responsible for all evil in the world, and in particular for the need for Jesus to die a horrible death by crucifixion. That's quite a transgression, for an entire gender to be responsible for the torture and death of Jesus.
Virtually all other religions find the views of the Roman Catholic Church, and its derivative churches, regarding original sin and the vilification of women to be peculiar at best, and outrageous at worst. Even the Eastern Christian Churches, which grew out of the split and subsequent fall of the Roman Empire, consider their Western brethren's doctrine of original sin to be wrong. But Augustine was declared a saint, and his philosophy is at the very core of the Roman Catholic Church and most of the spin-offs that make up the bulk of American and European Christian churches.
The Catholic Church's official position is that Augustine combined Aristotle's teachings on morality with Christian theology, producing a more ethical church. But the opposite is true: Augustine corrupted the very foundation of Aristotle's ethics. Aristotelian ethics works towards natural human desires and pleasures, but Christian ethics tend to turn people away from pleasure and toward asceticism and abstinence.
Here, we must be very careful not to paint all Christian churches with a single brush. There are vast differences between various denominations' interpretation of the Bible's teachings. For example, Roman Catholics enjoy wine, beer and strong drink in moderation, following Aristotle's ethics, and the Roman Catholic Church has sponsored some of the finest musicians and composers in the history of the world. By contrast the Church of Christ, one of America's conservative Baptist denominations, believe that alcohol is sinful, they don't allow musical instruments (only vocal music) in their worship, and they frown on dancing.
Using Aristotle's ethics, people went happily about the business of enjoying themselves, in moderation, whether it was through sex, wine, food, song, games, pride in their work, or rest on their days off. Consider Aristotle's view of leisure:
And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.
– Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, Chapter 7
But Augustine changed all that: Now anything pleasurable was a vice. The Christians instead declared leisure (sloth) to be one of the seven deadly sins. Or take lust: Christian theology teaches that chastity is the opposite of lust, and chastity is a virtue. This is the exact opposite of Aristotle's view, which is that both lust and chastity are bad, and that sex should be practiced with healthy moderation.
The Christians' "seven deadly sins," lust, hunger, a desire for leisure, anger, envy and pride, pretty much sum up human nature. We all feel these things. By turning our natural, instinctive emotions into sins, the Christians achieved what the Jews (and others) had failed to achieve in two thousand years: They made people feel bad for following their human nature.
Augustine's philosophy of guilt was brilliant. Before Augustine, a decent, moral person could live and exemplary life, never commit a crime, never hurt anyone, marry and raise a fine family, and at the end of life, be in the good graces of Yahweh for eternity. But Augustine ended that; merely being good and moral isn't enough. You had to accept Christianity or face grave consequences.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
– Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
The concept of an afterlife is ancient. One of the oldest questions in the world is, "Is there life after death?" Philosophers ask the same question a different way: "Is the corporeal body separate from the soul?" In other words, is there some essential part of us, called the "self" or "soul" or "conscious entity," something that inhabits the body while the body is alive, but that carries on, perhaps to some final destination, or perhaps to be reincarnated in a different body?
The earlier concepts of the afterlife, such as the early Greek Hades and the Jewish Sheol, tend to picture a dark and featureless, somewhat gloomy afterlife. It's not unpleasant in the sense of punishment, more like a place where the soul either sleeps or wanders after death. Early Greek, Roman and Jewish religions didn't distinguish Heaven and Hell – everyone went to the same place. The Greek Hades is perhaps the best known to Westerners since the term is still in widespread use, and studied as part of World History. The Jewish Sheol was originally very much like Hades, although it didn't have the full cast of characters of Greek Mythology.
As time went by, the Jews, Greeks and Romans divided their afterlife according to the virtues of its inhabitants. Hades was divided into sections that include the Elysian Fields where the heroic and valorous spent eternity, and Tarterus, where for example, Sisyphus had to spend eternity rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it slip and roll back down, time and again. By the time of Jesus, the Jews had planted the seeds of our modern Heaven and Hell. They still believed that all souls went to the same place, Sheol, to await the resurrection, but additionally, the good waited happily, whereas bad people were punished. The parable of Lazarus and Dives, recounted in the gospel of Luke in the New Testament, illustrated what many Jews of the time believed, that a good man (Lazarus the beggar) would spend eternity in the happy company of Abraham, and the bad man (David the rich man) spent eternity in torment.
The Christians were the ones who "turned up the volume" on the ideas of Heaven and Hell. Dante's The Divine Comedy, written in the early fourteenth century, describes Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in vivid and horrifying details. It is considered an encapsulation of the Heaven-Purgatory-Hell meme's evolution during the Middle Ages leading up to the Renaissance. Dante put to pen to paper, and created a vivid, thoroughly detailed, and well-crafted version of what many believed in his time. One can see the Greek, Judaic and Pagan influences in the Christian view of Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, but by Dante's time, the Christians had refined and polished it beyond anything that had come before.
The Christian afterlife had several important additions over its predecessors.
First, the rewards and punishments were dramatically amplified over the Judaic Sheol and Pagan Hades traditions. The Christian Heaven meme evolved into a place where you enjoy absolute and unconditional bliss, and the Christian Hell meme evolved to a place where you suffer unimaginable pain and torture.
Second, in the Christian (and some Jewish) versions of the Heaven/Hell memes, you only get one chance. There is no reincarnation; if you screw up, you're punished forever, and if you are good, you're happy forever. This closed a "loophole" in the afterlife, one that allowed believers to say, "Well, if I screw up this time, the worst is that I'll be sent back to try again." No more second chances.
Third, the Christian rewards or punishment, embodied in the Heaven/Hell memes became badly out of line with the deeds. Eternal torture in Hell was like murdering a child for spilling milk. The rewards of Heaven are similarly out of line – a good life on Earth gains you unending bliss, not in proportion to your deeds on earth, not for a lifetime, or a thousand, or a million years, but forever.
Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you."
– Matthew 28:18-20
The common cold is a virus that lives in the fluids of your nose and throat, and it's fairly fragile. Expose it to a dry, cool environment, and it's dead. And if it stays in your body too long, it's dead – your body develops antibodies within a week or two of infection. So the cold virus has a problem: It has to infect someone else quickly or die. The cold virus achieves by making you sneeze and cough. A sneeze or cough ejects a lot of saliva and mucous in the form of tiny droplets, and the cold virus hitches a ride in these nice little "microclimates" to its next victim.
We see this sort of "amplified distribution" throughout nature – many, many species have amazing and clever ways to spread their offspring. Every kid who lives near a maple tree knows that it has "helicopter seeds" that spin like little propellers, and can be carried long distances by the wind. The maple tree, like the cold virus, is spreading itself wider. Fruit trees wrap their seeds first in a tough coating that can survive through the gut, then in a tasty flesh that is good to eat, prompting animals to ingest their seed along with the tasty fruit, and later defecate it a long distance from the parent tree.
Religious proselytizing is very much like the sneeze that the virus induces: It forcibly propagates the religious memeplex into places it otherwise would not have access to. Without proselytizing, each religion would only spread by "intimate contact," a potential convert who of his/her own choice decided to learn about and adopt it. In a nutshell, it is "passive spread" versus "active spread." Kissing is passive: the virus doesn't contribute to its own spread. Sneezing is active: The viral infection itself triggers the mechanism for its own propagation. The Proselytism meme is a form of active spreading, because it "takes God's message to the uninitiated."
A number of religions do not advocate proselytism. Judaism avoids it, some say largely because of the historical dominance of Christianity and Islam, and the fear of inciting further persecution. Hinduism teaches that there is but one faith, but it is revealed differently to different peoples, so the idea of converting someone from one faith to another doesn't really make sense, although there are sects, such as the Hare Krishnas, who do proselytize.
Does proselytizing work? Let's compare the spread of the non-proselytizing religions with those that do proselytize. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the LDS Church, or Mormons) are well known for the "missions" that are required of all young men and some young women in the LDS Church. And the results are dramatic. According to the American Council of Churches, the LDS Church was the second-fastest growing church in American in 2006. Which church beat it? The Assemblies of God, the other church with an avowed goal to have mission and growth in "every country in the world." In 2006, a year in which seventeen of the twenty largest churches in America reported no growth or lost membership, the LDS Church grew by 1.74% and the Assemblies of God grew 1.81%. The only other major church that grew at all was the Catholic church, at 0.83%. This might seem like decent growth for the Catholics, until you realize that the population of the United States grew faster than the Catholic Church (0.89% that same year). So the Catholics are losing ground too! Only the most aggressive two churches in America, the ones with the strongest Proselytism meme, actually gained ground.
(Note: The American Council of Churches also reported that the top-growing church was the Orthodox Church in America, however, the numbers were highly suspect, and some reports put their membership at ten percent of their reported value, with negative growth. I have therefore put them on the "no growth or declining" list, which may or may not be correct.)
The Proselytism meme is interesting because it shows us evolution in action. Churches that actively proselytize are growing, all the others are static or shrinking. At a growth rate of 1.81%, the Assemblies of God church will double its membership every thirty-eight years. By contrast, many of the other Christian churches in America are shrinking at that same rate or more, meaning their memberships will drop by fifty percent every few decades. It doesn't take the gift of prophecy to see that in a few hundred years, the Assemblies of God and LDS churches will dominate in America.
Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
The quote from Kurt Vonnegut above summarizes one of the biggest problems that scientists and atheists have when trying to discuss their understanding of the world with those who believe in God.
Religion has put forth a wonderful idea, that the world under God's guiding hand is essentially a good place. According to this view, Yahweh created a perfect world, one in which there was no evil. But evil forces, represented by Satan and the Serpent of the Garden of Eden (who may be the same, depending on who is telling the story), brought temptation, sin and evil into God's creation. Humankind fell from God's grace, and has been suffering ever since. But all is not lost, the essential goodness of God's universe is still there for all to see, and is exemplified by the good deeds, kindness and redemption seen every day by the faithful. Someday soon, Yahweh will gather His forces and drive the evil out of the world, and the perfection of Yahweh's creation will be restored.
This is a beautiful, and very appealing, meme.
On October 3, 2003, the ninth-highest paid celebrities in the United States, two men who together made close to $60 million per year, had their careers utterly destroyed and one of them nearly lost his life. They were never able to return to entertaining, and the hotel where they performed lost over $45 million per year in direct ticket sales, and probably far more in gambling revenues, hotel occupancy and dining. All told, the annual loss must have been in the neighborhood of $75 to $100 million per year. On top of that, over 250 cast and crew members lost their jobs when the show ended, a further loss of income of somewhere around $10 to $20 million per year to them and their families.
That show was, of course, the wonderful Siegfried and Roy, Masters of the Incredible, and their famous white tigers at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. The event that caused this financial calamity was that one of the tigers did what tigers do: He bit Roy Horn on the neck, nearly killing him.
Although the facts aren't completely clear, the most reliable witnesses all seem to agree: The tiger, Montecore, wasn't trying to hurt Roy, in fact, quite the opposite. A woman in the front row had a big hairdo that was distracting Montecore, and the woman foolishly reached out to touch the animal. Roy jumped between Montecore and the woman, Montecore took Roy's arm in his teeth, Roy ordered Montecore to "Release!" which he did. Then, tragedy: Roy stepped back, tripped over Montecore's big paws, and fell down. Montecore, by this time afraid and excited, grasped Roy by the neck as he would have a tiger kitten, and dragged him offstage to safety.
Tiger experts (including Siegfried and Roy) say that, had Montecore been attacking Roy, he would have instinctively shaken Roy's body, probably breaking his neck. Instead, he carefully pulled Roy offstage, where stage hands managed to separate the two. Montecore didn't understand that a human doesn't have the same thick, loose skin on the back of his necks that a tiger kitten has, which allows a parent to grasp it safely and carry it around.
Montecore's "gentle" treatment of his friend, Roy Horn, put Roy on the critical list at the hospital for weeks. A portion of Roy's skull had to be removed to relieve the pressure from swelling of his brain. He was transferred to UCLA Medical Center for long-term recovery. Roy Horn eventually regained his speech, but can only walk with assistance.
Although this is not a book about the macabre, nor a horror story, we need to explore this just a bit further to make it absolutely clear. Try to imagine just how horrible Roy Horn's injuries were. Imagine that I asked you to take two or three steak knives from your kitchen, and plunge them into your head and neck. Even one such knife wound would cause you unbearable pain. Then at the same time, I'd like you to put your head in a vice, and crank it down until your skull cracks in several places. This is no joke – it's what happened to Roy Horn. And remember, the tiger wasn't trying to hurt him.
Finally, consider this: This is how a tiger makes its living every day. This sort of pain and agony are necessary, not once, not a dozen times, but thousands of times in a tiger's lifetime. And not just tigers, but every carnivore makes its living this way: Lions, tigers, cheetahs, wolves, coyotes, rattlesnakes, polar bears, killer whales, moray eels, piranhas ... the list goes on and on. The amount of suffering caused by the ordinary day-to-day eating habits of the world's carnivores and parasites is almost beyond human comprehension.
One of the concepts that is hardest for many people to grasp is the utter indifference of nature to suffering. To the deer who is suffering in a tiger's jaws, nothing could matter more. But evolution has no feelings, all that matters is survival. If the tiger's meal causes pain, so it goes. In fact, when a tigress teaches her young to hunt, she will sometimes deliberately cause more suffering, by injuring rather than killing her prey, so that her cubs can learn how to properly finish the job. Her survival and that of her cubs shapes her behavior; her prey's suffering does not.
We humans have a bad tendency to anthropomorphize, to assign human feelings and motives to other animals, objects, and events. In this case we'd like imagine that "mother nature" (also known as "evolution") has motives and feelings, that it is malevolent and even evil. Or, some might instead think the tiger himself has evil or cruel intentions. But this is a purely egocentric point of view, "If the tiger is hurting me, it must be cruel." Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no motivation whatsoever to evolution; it just happens. The tiger isn't cruel or evil, it is just following the behavioral patterns that evolution created for its survival. The tiger has no idea about the pain and suffering it causes. Evolution sharpens the tiger's teeth and claws, not to cause pain, but rather to get more food. The pain and suffering are irrelevant side effects from the tiger's evolutionary "point of view."
This is not to say that pain and suffering aren't relevant to evolution; clearly they are. Pain encourages the deer to run faster when the tiger attacks, it keeps us from putting our hands in the fire, or stepping on sharp objects. Pain is a critical trait in evolution, as are happiness, anger, jealousy and all of our emotions. But evolution doesn't "care" about your state of mind, only your survival. If your survival depends on some other creature suffering a painful death, then so it goes. And if some other creature's survival depends on your pain and death, too bad for you. Evolution isn't good or evil, it just favors those who survive.
This is the reality that Kurt Vonnegut is talking about in the quote that starts this section, when he says, "Science never cheered anyone up." The truth about evolution, about suffering, and about the utter indifference of natural selection to our happiness, is really quite unpleasant. Nature is filled with suffering and pain, and the world is not a nice place. According to scientists, there is no magical, fun-filled ending: Life is a struggle, and then you die.
Contrast this with the three Abrahamic religions' views of the world. The memes that make up Judaism, Islam and Christianity have, at their core, a loving, perfect Yahweh who is essentially good, and all of our pain and suffering are temporary. Some day, they tell us, this struggle will be over, evil will be driven from the world, and we'll live in peace and harmony.
The contrast between these two memeplexes couldn't be more stark: Evolution's utter indifference, versus Yahweh's absolute benevolence. Is it any wonder that scientists have a hard time getting their memeplex to spread? This is one of the very best examples of survival of the fittest, illustrating that a meme's fitness can be completely divorced from its truthfulness. This truth about nature is so unpleasant that this alone has driven many people away from atheism, back into the reassuring arms of religion.
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
– George Santayana (1863-1952)
To wrap up this chapter, let's take a look at synergy – memes that work together. One of the recurring themes throughout this book is the memeplex, a group of mutually supporting memes that together are more than the sum of the parts. The three memes we just studied – Intolerance, Guilt, and Heaven/Hell, plus the Monotheism meme from earlier – are a perfect example of this.
Let's start with a peculiar feature of Monotheism. A polytheist might worship one god over another, but it is purely a practical matter – you pray to a god of love for romance, and a god of war for victory. The idea that you might pick one of the gods and say, "This is the only real god, all the others are fakes," doesn't make sense to a polytheist. But the monotheist has made exactly this choice: He has picked one particular god out, and declared that everyone else is wrong. If you could step back 3000 years and forget everything you'd been taught in this modern age, you would probably think the monotheist's beliefs were arrogant and wrong.
Given the monotheist's decision to select just one god above all others, it's not a very big step to select one church over all others, and declare that not only is Yahweh the one and only god, but our particular interpretation of the Bible is the one and the only correct one. And this leads to the final leap: You can only get saved by Jesus from your sins by our particular church. We have the rules, we have the exclusive correct interpretation of the scriptures, and any deviation from these rules will result in your eternal damnation in Hell. (Again I remind readers that not all Christian denominations make these claims, but some do.)
Pretty strong stuff, isn't it? This is what you might call a "corollary meme" – let's call it the Monochurch meme – the "our church is the only church" meme. Now let's see how this Monochurch meme interacts with the others.
The Intolerance meme gave religion a huge boost in popularity, because it gave people strong reasons to believe (or pretend to believe) in Yahweh. The Intolerance meme was the first active weapon that religions used against each other, giving them license to destroy one another's temples and kill one another's members This was a great advance for the Religion Virus memeplex, but like all coercive forces, if it's the only motivation, it leads to reluctant, half-hearted followers.
Next came the Guilt meme, which vilified feelings that every healthy human has: sex, hunger, desire, pride, fatigue – pretty much everything good in life was now bad. Previously (for example, under Greek ethics), you had to do something bad in order to feel guilt, but with the Christian's new-found sins, you were guilty simply for being human. On top of that, if you somehow managed to avoid all human temptations and lead an exemplary life, you were still guilty, because you inherited Eve's sin! You are in trouble no matter what.
And third, only Jesus can absolve your sins. It doesn't matter how sorry you are, it didn't matter how much you do to repent or correct any wrongs you might have done, it doesn't matter what the balance of your good deeds is to your bad deeds. There is only one thing that will save you, and that is to accept the Christian religion's dogma.
And the last "team member" in this memeplex are the Heaven/Hell and Armageddon memes. If you don't accept the Christian dogma, the consequences are appalling. Eternal damnation and (depending on exactly which branch of Christianity you subscribe to) anything from eternal disappointment to eternal torture.
Going back to where we started, the Monochurch meme, we discover that:
These memes, which mutated and matured to their full power in the Middle Ages, are very powerful indeed when combined. The synergy between them makes the memeplex much more powerful than the mere sum of the memes would suggest.