Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Can Bacteria Help Us Understand Religion?
https://thehumanist.com/magazine/may-june-2017/features/can-bacteria-help-us-understand-religion...Our relationship with any given type of bacterium may be symbiotic, meaning a mutually beneficial arrangement in which we help each other survive—like the little guys that live in our gut and eat our food waste. Alternately, the relationship may be adversarial—as in the parasitic bacteria that begin to eat our muscle tissue when we get a cut and must be killed off by antibodies or antibiotics to prevent sepsis. Some organisms may be perfectly capable of playing either role—eating either our waste or our bodies, depending on the circumstances.
...
The spectrum of relationships we have with the self-replicating bacteria we host may offer some insight into our relationship with the self-replicating religious ideas that we also host.
...
All of this variability creates a lot of space for the possibility that some religious memes are symbiotic and others parasitic—and that the package of ideas espoused by any given church or individual might include some of both. Asking whether religion broadly is harmful or beneficial may be as silly as asking the same question about bacteria. It just is, whether we like it or not.
And yet we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that some religions are doing tremendous harm in our world, to the degree that religion’s mutually exclusive truth claims and tendency to promote tribalism may put humanity’s future in jeopardy. At the individual level, religious beliefs and edicts are causing immeasurable suffering in the lives of individual people around the world, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable among us—women, children, the desperate, and the poor. If we want to move toward a better future, we cannot escape the task of addressing religious harms.
...
The spectrum of relationships we have with the self-replicating bacteria we host may offer some insight into our relationship with the self-replicating religious ideas that we also host.
...
All of this variability creates a lot of space for the possibility that some religious memes are symbiotic and others parasitic—and that the package of ideas espoused by any given church or individual might include some of both. Asking whether religion broadly is harmful or beneficial may be as silly as asking the same question about bacteria. It just is, whether we like it or not.
And yet we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that some religions are doing tremendous harm in our world, to the degree that religion’s mutually exclusive truth claims and tendency to promote tribalism may put humanity’s future in jeopardy. At the individual level, religious beliefs and edicts are causing immeasurable suffering in the lives of individual people around the world, disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable among us—women, children, the desperate, and the poor. If we want to move toward a better future, we cannot escape the task of addressing religious harms.
Too long of an article to provide a useful excerpt, I'm afraid. But an interesting piece nonetheless - though clearly the positive memes found in religion (altruism, etc.) don't need a religion to spread.
1 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
The key to all our problems is so simple, but impossible to accomplish.
