From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Sun Sep 05 1999 - 18:59:37 MDT
Greg Burch wrote,
>The same sort of thing will happen to me from my own Catholic upbringing,
>especially if I encounter the full blown "Magic Show" (as I used to call
the
>Mass when I was an altar boy); it's almost like some kind of weird drug
rush.
Reading this leaves me with the impression that in some ways a Catholic
upbringing must feel similar to a childhood experience of intense psychic
abuse. Would you think it disparaging if someone called you a "recovering
Catholic"?
>Interestingly, the memories don't fade for many people, but just go into a
>dormant state. I think a big part of the resurgence in religious fervor in
>America now can be attributed to the reactivation of religious memes
>implanted in childhood among the Boomers by life situations they're just
now
>encountering: Parenting and middle age career and physiological stress. A
>whole panoply of programming was implanted in them, just waiting to be
>activated by these predictable events in the stages of a typical human
life.
Dormant memories sound vaguely reminiscent of post-traumatic stress
syndrome.
I wonder how far toward Armageddon the resurgence in religious fervor (and
religious memes) will take us. Do you wonder how much dormant programming
might influence Homo sapiens to retreat from a technological Singularity, or
from an extropic Type I civilization? I view religious memes as analogous to
infectious disease. Some people display greater immunity than others.
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