From: M. E. Smith (mesmith@rocketmail.com)
Date: Mon Jan 12 1998 - 09:27:31 MST
Estacado: No sarcasm; I'm truly sorry for sacrificing
clarity for brevity and writing something that could
be construed as calling you a Nazi.
What I meant by the phrase "Eradicate? How? (Sieg
Hiel!)" was that the only way the God meme could be
"eradicated from the planet" as you suggested was
through totalitarianism. For example, since the God
meme is carried in books, those books would have to
be destroyed. It would have been better if I had
replaced the string "(Sieg Heil!)" with "(Book
burning?)". Again, I'm sorry.
I guess what I've been trying to say is that (IMHO)
it would be impossible to eradicate the God meme from
all minds, so maybe your life will improve if you
choose your battles more carefully. For example,
fight the fundamentalist Christians who are against
teaching evolutionary theory to children, not the
extropians who sometimes joke about God.
I suspect that when memetics advances, someone will
discover that this is rigorously true: all
sufficiently complex memetic systems will give rise
to a God meme. Thus, to me, it's like you're getting
upset that viruses exist or that 7 is a prime number.
Sometimes happiness depends on accepting what you
cannot change. (At the risk of upsetting you again, I
joke: Maybe you should make peace with the God meme.)
As for giving you a break, okay, I will. I won't post
anything else to this list on this subject during 1998.
Peace.
-- Mike Smith
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