Religovirology

Written by Eric Bright
brig...@gmail.com

Challenges of the project ....... xv
How to read the book .......xvi
Who should read this book ....... xvi
Who should not read this book ....... xvii
About me ....... xviii
Preamble ....... xxi
Introduction ....... xxvii
The Scope ....... xxxix
Mission ....... xliii
Chapter One .......1
Forced-move or predisposition? .......2
Modules and tass .......4
The brain in action .......10
Falling stone .......13
Causal Operator .......17
What may go wrong? .......21
Spiritual vs. God-based religions .......24
Chapter Two .......29
Evolution of the Language of Religion .......30
Part One: From a Finite Society to an Infi nite God .......31
Part Two: Neurotheology (Why God Won’t Go Away) .......38
Part Three: Social Engineering & Thoughtware Programming .......46
Part Four: Bugs of Our Thoughtware .......48
Chapter Three .......57
Function .......58
No Observer, No Function .......61
Fuzzy Function Set .......64
On the nature of ti .......68
Chapter Four .......71
Intentionality .......72
Chapter Five .......83
Consciousness Reduced .......84
Chapter Six .......97
Adaptive Explanation of Religion .......98
Chapter Seven .......105
Free Will .......106
Chapter Eight .......119
Free Will Revisited .......120
Hash Function, Time, and Quantum Mechanics .......120
Chapter Nine .......127
Biology of Religion - Acquired Logic Defi ciency Syndrome - ALDS .......128
Cost Analysis .......134
1. An Introduction to Thoughtware Datavirology .......138
2. Religion .......140
Fuzzy Logic .......144
Chapter Ten .......149
The Trial of Logic .......150
The genealogy of Logics .......150
On Inescapability of Logic .......155
Consistency versus Coexistency .......155
Contradiction Matters .......158
The method of investigation versus the method of revelation .......161
Chapter Eleven .......179
A Logical Remark .......180
The law of impossibility - not everything is possible .......180
Axioms .......181
Sequents .......181
Chapter Twelve .......187
Religovirus (HLDV) - Religionitis (ALDS) .......188
Human-Logic Defi ciency Virus - HLDV .......189
Religovirus Core Component - RCC .......191
A Sherlock Holmes Story – When Everything Makes Sense .......193
The fallacy of Prophecy .......199
The Host’s Thoughtware .......204
Taxonomy .......205
HLDV Apparatuses .......207
Chapter Thirteen .......241
Contagious Addictions .......242
Chapter Fourteen .......255
Wisdom of Evolution .......256
Chapter Fifteen .......273
Blocking the Infection .......274
Chapter Sixteen .......279
Abolition of Exploitation .......280
Reflections .......284
Appendix I .......287
Appendix II .......289
Appendix III .......291
Bibliography .......293
Endnotes .......307
Index

Back Cover

"The world holds two classes of humans: intelligent humans without religion, and religious humans without intelligence."

Abu'l-Ala-Al-Ma'arri / 973-1057 / Syrian poet

You might think that the above quote is an exaggeration. When you finish reading Religovirology, you might think otherwise. The model proposed in the book generates similar outcomes. Also the bleeding-edge biological and psychological researches seem to be converging towards the same conclusion: there is something intellectually wrong with holding religious beliefs. Seriously!

It is all about modeling

Imagine if we had a model of economy that could really work. By “work” I mean imagine that the model could approximate the behaviour of the market closely enough for us to see a few steps more ahead. What would have happened had we had such a model? We could have predicted many of the current downfalls of our fragile economy accurately enough to avoid major financial losses. Some outcaste economist made such a model and predicted, indeed, the current financial crisis years ago. Watch The Money Masters to see it for yourself. It was made more than ten years ago. Sadly enough, many people did not pay any attention to the proposed model.

Now, imagine if we had a model of human behaviour in relationship with religions in general that could work. Again, by “work” I mean the model could have predicted, approximately of course, how a human being might behave under certain circumstances when she or he is exposed to different religious beliefs. What could we achieve having such a model? We could have predicted the possible clashes between religions, the inevitable event that Bernard Lewis talked about in The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990) or Samuel P. Huntington predicted in his work The Clash of Civilizations. Notice that their models were proposed years ago too, although this time a handful number of people paid attention to them.

Yet again, imagine if we had a model of religions that could predict how they emerge, how they evolve, and how they spread around and do what they do. What could we do with such a model? We could predict religions behaviour and their courses of actions so when their measures approach critical thresholds, we could prepare ourselves to protect against their rages. Religovirology is an attempt to make such a model of religions.

Background

In year 1976 Richard Dawkins came across a discovery that changed our understanding of the world forever. He noticed that thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and pieces of cultural elements, as well as information spread around the belief systems in the same way that genes make copies of themselves and multiply. He called those pieces of cultural elements that copy themselves and multiply and move from mind to mind “meme.” Why meme? Because it rhymes with “gene” and it behaves like one.

Memetics, the science of studying memes, is growing now and finding new fields to play on. One of those fields, not developed till now, is the study of religions. In Religovirology we make some observations and build a model upon them. The final goal is to be able to predict the behaviour of the meme of religion. Since religious beliefs have all properties of deleterious memes, we call them viruses of mind, whence comes religovirus and religovirology.

Appears on the back cover of the book

Religovirology is supposed to contain experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence, complementary to a project like The Impossibility of God (Martin and Monnier 2003) that contains abstract reasoning.

If we want to make a strong methodology to treat religionitis (religion infection), we need to have certain issues ironed out before we begin. A scientist who needs to study the disorder faces the challenge of showing how supernatural hypotheses fail in all respects. Such hypotheses live on dishonesty, ignorance, fear, and misunderstanding of several issues. Unfortunately, we cannot do much about the dishonesty of the patients. Nevertheless, we can:

Start to learn how the brain works
See the role of language in myth making
Build a theory of function
Understand intentionality
Break down the mystery of consciousness
Deal with the puzzle of free will
And prove the inevitability of logic

These are the main themes used repeatedly to support the failed hypothesis of religion. Consequences of studying them can be huge.

From the Introduction of the book

This is a book of observation, categorization, and modelling on a painful, suffering-causing category of things called religion. We even can say that this is an attempt to model religions as if they exist and as if they inflict suffering upon us. If we feel the pain, then I feel justified, not in a logical sense, to write a book about what has caused me that pain. That is enough justification, for me, to go about attempting to build up a model of the thing that causes me the pain. If you have found yourself in my league, so the better for me! If not, so the better for you, since you might be immune to what causes me such an intolerable pain!

What are the objectives of this book? They are as follows:

To show that the relationship between our evolutionary brain, body, and environment has certain properties and configurations (call them P)
To show that IF P exists, THEN religion pops-up as a by-product of the configuration; hence the religions. To show that this by-product also evolves through the evolution of its host’s language
To show that P is everything but supernatural; i.e. breaking down the following strongest defences for the necessity of a supernatural language:

The claim that a natural explanation is inadequate for explaining intentionality, because Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem conclusively says so
The claim that consciousness cannot be reductively explained away based on any natural process
The claim that since the functions of artefacts are the signs of the existence of their creators, THEN the functions of none-artefacts have to be also the signs of the existence of a creator (or some creators)
That is to say, anything that has a function has a creator as well (a logical fallacy of induction: IF A has a function F AND a creator, THEN everything that has a function, has a creator). This can be used to build an argument from Design
The claim that free will actually means something, and it is principally possible to obtain, and its existence cries for a supernatural explanation

To argue for adapting the meme language to the biology of religion
And to argue that the behaviour of a typical religion is perfectly explainable in terms of viral patterns

Religovirology

CONTENTS