[In] this and all other well-governed Christian realmes, the cryme of blasphemy against God ... is a cryme of the highest nature, and ought to be severely punished ... with death.
– Proceedings against Thomas Aikenhead, Records of Justiciary in Edinburgh, A.D. 1696
I did not set out to write a book about religion. The seeds of this this book were planted twenty years ago while studying for my Master's Degree in Computer Science at Stanford University. I had the good fortune to take two classes in the computational aspects of natural language (syntax and semantics) from the brilliant Professor Winograd. At the same time I encountered Richard Dawkins' Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes, and Douglas Hofstadter's article, On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures, which introduced me to the fascinating concept of memes.
Professor Winograd made a very strong case that true artificial intelligence (AI – computers that can really think) will be beyond our grasp for a very long time; that it is a very hard problem indeed. The theme of artificial intelligence is pervasive in our fiction, from Star Trek's ship computer and the character Data, to the movie Terminator. Most laypersons (non computer-scientists) believe that powerful AI systems are just around the corner. In Professor Winograd's class, we learned that the human mind is far more marvelous than most of us can comprehend, and that true AI is still a long, long way off.
While writing my term paper for Winograd's class, I had one of those "Aha!" moments, and wrote my first paper on memes, in which I argued that AI could arise as an "emergent property" of the "meme complex" that comprised the computer-science community. My term paper's thesis was that a computer system was possible that was beyond the comprehension of any one individual computer scientist, that even though we as individuals weren't smart enough to create AI, it might be that the memeplex of computer science could evolve an AI system. In a nutshell, I realized that the rules Charles Darwin discovered that guide evolution in nature can be abstracted to a higher level, and applied to other domains.
Professor Winograd gave me a decent grade on the paper. I think he found my claims to be rather far fetched and fanciful (and he was right), but he gave me credit for the sheer originality and amusement value of my paper.
I was attending Stanford University thanks to a graduate-studies grant from the Hewlett Packard Company. Although I was grateful to HP for the grant, I was quickly becoming a disillusioned employee, having been hired during the unfortunate period right after Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard retired from their day-to-day management of the company's operations. Almost immediately after they retired, the company started an inexorable slide into ordinariness, to transform itself from a unique company that made you feel like part of a family, into just-another-Silicon-Valley-computer-maker. It was a very sad time for me and many other HP employees, to watch something special slowly disappear.
As this downhill process continued at Hewlett Packard, I started thinking about memes and cultural evolution, and the paper I'd written for Professor Winograd's class. It struck me that memetics could give real insight into Hewlett Packard's changing culture. Silicon Valley corporations are evolving, competing entities that all share a single "ecosphere." They compete for the same employees, they produce similar goods, they sell to the same consumers, they pay the same taxes, and they buy from the same raw-material suppliers. They even dump their sewage down the same drains, which is a lot more important than you might think: It costs a small fortune to dispose of all of the toxic chemicals and heavy metals that Silicon Valley companies consume and discard.
I did a bit of exploratory writing about Hewlett Packard, corporate culture and memes, and quickly discovered that memetics gave amazing insights into virtually all aspects of human culture. My exploratory writings expanded and expanded, covering jokes, corporations, music, hunter/gatherer knowledge, literature ... and there was one brief chapter about religion. Then a new job, a move to a different state, the joy and hard work of raising three young children, and a dozen other events, took over, and without any conscious decision to do so, I put the book aside. But my fascination for the subject never waned, and I kept reading everything I could lay my hands on. Religion books, sociology books, meme books, history books, biographies of corporate presidents, on and on. Anything I could find that taught me more about the behavior of memes and memeplexes went into my pile of books to read.
That was two decades ago. During those two decades, much has happened: The word "meme" has entered the popular lexicon, and several excellent books have been published. The political and social climate in America has changed dramatically. There has been a "sea change," a dramatic shift in the winds, in the religious climate in America. Religious dialog has simultaneously become both more conservative and more liberal. On the conservative side, America's religious right has had a huge resurgence in power and influence. On the liberal side, several excellent books harshly critical of religion and religious dogma became bestsellers recently: David Mills' Atheist Universe, Bart Erman's Misquoting Jesus, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Dan Barker's Godless, Sam Harris' The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great. While Erman is hardly an atheist, his carefully researched and very readable book opened the eyes of millions regarding the "inerrancy" of the Bible. David Mills' simple and readable arguments supporting the atheist view is hugely popular. Dawkins' direct and unapologetic rejection of religion seems harsh to many readers, but his book is thorough and well reasoned. Dennett takes a careful philosopher's approach, aiming in particular at American Christianity, to expose its hold on politics and daily lives. Barker tells the fascinating tale of an Evangelical Christian who became one of America's best-known atheists. And Hitchens makes the claim that religion "poisons everything," very strong words indeed. Just ten years ago, the socio-political climate in America would have made these books nearly impossible to publish; today they're on the shelves at the mega-stores.
The spark that brought this book back to life was my father's illness and death, and my conversations with Aunt Carolyn, the story of which is told as the final Interlude, below. The illness and death of someone close brings on an examination of ones' own life. My grandfather had seen religion as his salvation from his "misery," whereas my father, ironically, was just the opposite, blaming religion for much of what went wrong in his life. I thought they were both mistaken, focusing their energy on religion rather than on their own lives and their own actions. My grandfather used religion as an anesthetic, and my father used it as an excuse. I was pleased to find that I hadn't fallen into the same traps they had, of using religion to avoid responsibility for my own life. Whatever decisions I'd made, whatever directions my life had taken, those were my decisions. But why, I kept asking, had two intelligent, well-educated men fallen into the same trap, albeit in different ways?
That, ultimately, was what made me "put pen to paper" again: To answer that very question, both for my own personal satisfaction, and because I think it's an important message for all of humanity.