religion

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An angry and probably unpleasant rant

It’s Friday.  yay.

Today’s date (February 6, 2026 CE or AD) has a mildly amusing coincidence/repetition of digits, 2-6-26 in the shortened American version of the date layout.  In the European system, the date would be almost palindromic (6-2-26) but that’s leaving out the zeroes in front of the day and month digits and ignoring the number of the millennium.  So it’s not quite as cool as it could be.

Some might say that such numbers and the arrangements and the noticing thereof can never be “cool”, but such people are troglodytic idiots.  They live in a world full of and shaped by complex ideas, by innovation and technology they could not have invented themselves, and which they don’t bother to try to understand because other people take care of and do all that stuff.

I’ve said before, many times (with sadness and regret and yes, quite a lot of anger) that if it were up to most people, we would all still be living in caves (the few who remain alive, at least).  That’s metaphorical, mind you; very few humans actually ever lived in caves as far as we can tell.  It’s just that the remains of those who died in caves (and their artifacts) are much more likely to endure to be discovered than the tools and remains of those who lived on the savannahs and such.

Anyway, the troglodytes have a quite common attribute, one that might explain a good deal about them:  even though they may have the capacity to read, even though they may have been taught to read, they don’t choose to do it.  It’s both sad and quietly horrifying.

Even those who claim to read just one book (e.g., the Bible, the Koran, etc.) don’t even really read those books.  You can tell, because they clearly don’t live their lives respecting all the precepts of those books.

This fact can sometimes be bad, but more often than that, it’s just as well.  Those books are horrific (and often just horrible, aesthetically).  They also tend to be rather stupid by modern standards, but it’s hard to hold them too much to task for that.  They were, after all, written from depths of profound ignorance about the universe.  One cannot know a truth before it has been discovered.

Of course, if those books really had been written, or at least inspired, by an omniscient being or beings, they could reasonably be expected to be very smart books by any standards.  Alas, they are not.  Trust me, I’ve read many of them, as well as many other books that don’t claim to be the products of omniscience, but which would be far more convincing* if they did than those ancient compilations of legend and myth and mental illness that are the so-called holy books.

Ironically, the Tao te Ching is much wiser than the aforementioned holy books, and it was never said to be written by anything other than a man.  It’s not perfect, of course, but it doesn’t really claim to be so.  Perhaps some of its adherents think it’s somehow “perfect”, but that doesn’t really matter.  After all, there are probably those who “think” Mein Kampf and The Art of the Deal are perfect.

Weirdly enough, some of these people would probably also say the Bible is perfect [Disappointed shrug and heavy sigh].  People are stupid.  And there are none so stupid as those who refuse to think.

Sorry, I don’t even know how I got to dealing with this set of subjects today.  It certainly was not planned.  Then again, nothing here was planned, other than that I would write a blog post as usual, which is not surprising.

It’s not as though I have anything better to do with my life‒that is, nothing better other than to shut it off, I suppose.  But so far, I am too much of a coward to do that.

I know, I know, there are those who (with truly very good intentions) will call continuing to be alive a “brave” choice, but though I appreciate such people’s kindness, that “choice” is very much the default.  In a similar vein, it’s not brave to hunt, or to fish, or to farm, if hunting or fishing or farming  is what you must do to survive.  It’s just pragmatic.

I am not brave for still being alive.  This is not to say that it would be brave for me to kill myself, either.  But it also would not necessarily be cowardly.

Bravery in the usual sense is overrated, anyway.  We can (and should) all be glad, of course, that there are people like firefighters, as well as honorable soldiers and honorable police officers.  But if one stops to think about it, one can see that we should all very much wish to live in a world in which bravery was not required, a world where heroes are not merely not needed but are not useful.

It’s likewise with so-called leaders.  If a society were functioning well, it would not need (or want) heroes or leaders, at least not in the traditional sense.  In a well-functioning civilization, people would see their elected officials as their employees, as the public servants that they are.  They are not, and should not be thought of as, leaders.  That’s just a troglodytic way of thinking.

Alas, we are far from such a well-functioning civilization yet.  Who knows if we ever shall achieve it?

I do know, however, that I will probably be working tomorrow, which means I will write a blog post, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  Until then, I hope you each and all have a very good day by any reasonable criteria.

*Especially modern science books.

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Or art thou but a virus of the mind, a false creation?

It’s Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 (CE or AD) as I write this.  I’m aware of no superstition in which Tuesday the 13th is either particularly unlucky or particularly lucky.  It’s just a day, even though it’s the 13th.  There are 13ths in every month, after all, though 31sts are another matter (it’s another prime number and is also a palindrome, if you will, of the 13th).

I do somewhat enjoy the fact that the numbers in the (American) expression of the date are: 01-13 and 2026.  Taking non-zero digits only of the month and century only would give us a situation in which the digits of the second half‒2, 2, and 6‒are twice the digits of the first half‒1, 1, and 3.

That’s quite tortured, I know, as far as finding patterns in numbers goes.  At least I’m just doing this for fun, because I enjoy such patterns.  I don’t see any real meaning in them other than “numbers are cool”.  But there are people who believe there is a deeper meaning in such number patterns, like some secret cypher left there by the gods.  It’s rather silly.  But it is of such mistaken attribution to purpose of mere random patterns that religions (and constellations) are made.  More’s the pity.

I have a bit of sympathy for our distant ancestors who first were left to make “meanings” of the various patterns and events they discerned among the various forces in the world with their big, advanced brains but couldn’t yet explain well.  So, they made up stories, and those stories involved the forces of nature being enacted and designed by “people” or sometimes just one “person”.  People were what they knew best.

It’s understandable.  It’s also just wrong (certainly as far as I can tell), as are most initial hypotheses.  Unfortunately, other people respond to those who speak with confidence, whether that confidence is warranted or not*.  And so, they believe.  And like viruses (which are just a kind of self-replicating data, after all) the superstitious ideas are able to use the machinery of human minds to reproduce themselves‒not because they want to reproduce themselves, but because the ones that tend to reproduce themselves tend to multiply, and even to mutate to greater reproduction and persistence and so on.

In case it’s not clear, I am not speaking metaphorically here.  This appears to be the way that religions and other ideologies occur and propagate.  There are, of course, many details at the level of individuals and why they are prone to absorb and then to pass these memeplexes on, either “horizontally” or “vertically” or both.

But there are similar such details in how specific viruses spread.  Does COVID latch onto this or that cell surface protein or glycopeptide?  Does it reproduce in this particular cell type better or another one?  Does it lead to sneezing or coughing in its host, thus making it airborne, or does it induce vomiting and/or diarrhea, making it more food or water borne, or does it reproduce in the organs of reproduction, leading it to be mainly sexually transmitted?  The details matter in dealing with specific viruses, but the pattern of origin and spread and mutation is general.

From these patterns, we can understand (for instance) why rapidly and aggressively lethal viruses tend to be replaced by more sublethal ones:  if your host dies too quickly, you don’t get as many chances to spread.  This requires no intentionality on the part of the virus.  It requires only the logic of replication, in which successful replicators tend to spread more than less successful ones and so come to dominate.

The competition requires no consciousness.  Similarly, religion does not require the existence of any actual deity to be able to cause people to believe in one.  And a religion’s prevalence doesn’t imply that it is correct, only that it is contagious and/or persistent but not instantly lethal.

We see cases of new and/or mutated mind viruses (religions in this case) that are indeed too virulent and so fail to become endemic,  Think of Jonestown, or the Branch Davidians, or Heaven’s Gate (and possibly Trumpism, but we shall see).

It’s possible for a virus that has existed in a body unnoticed or with minimal symptoms and signs for years or decades to respond to changes in the circumstances of its body by becoming more virulent again‒think of shingles (Zoster) the recrudescence of Chicken Pox (Varicella), or the horrible flare-ups (flares-up?) of some chronic hepatitides.

Similarly, just because the human race has endured so far with reasonable success despite being infected with various competing and mutually contradictory memeplexes does not mean it will continue to do so.  Certain of these mind virus variants have the clear potential to lead to globally life-threatening symptoms, and more than one shows signs of doing so.

But why would a virus, whether of the mind or of the body, do things that would lead to the destruction of the host it inhabits, and thereby itself?  That question misses the point***.  Viral evolution (like all such evolution) has no capacity to plan for the future.  It may seem that viruses mean to spread themselves, but that’s only because the ones that don’t tend, by their nature, to spread themselves don’t become prevalent; they don’t spread.

On the other hand, those that have, by chance, comparative advantage in terms of replication tend to replicate more and thus become more prevalent.  And if they mutate (which they will, see my point yesterday about how copying is never perfect) then those mutant forms that are more prone to replicate will replicate more, and of course, those mutants that have decreased the tendency to replicate or that destroy the host do not persist.  There’s no need for purpose; causality is enough.

This post is getting a little long for today, so I’ll draw it to a close.  I could say more on this subject and how the concept of the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators explains far more than just the literal evolution of life, but can provide insight into so much more, so many things.  Darwin was a mightier mind than he could ever know, or at least he came upon an idea that is more powerful than nearly any other that science has found.

Think on that, and be amazed.

*We’re living through some consequences of humans’ stupid tendency to trust people who convey confidence and certainty, even while telling patent lies.  Maybe we should hope for global thermonuclear war.  If humans survive it, maybe they would finally learn from that dreadful lesson**.

**But I doubt it.

***So why did I raise it?  For rhetorical purposes, though I have real discomfort with and distrust of rhetoric, it being one of the things that can help virulent mind viruses spread.