The Deadly Meme of Suicide Terrorism
This is a great example of how ideologies evolve, and how memes can mutate. Dennis Prager writes:
More than any other cause, I believe the reason behind Islam's impotence in controlling this mutative virus is that the memetic arsenal of Islam claims to be complete and self-sufficient, but it clearly is not. If we look just to the constrained ideological universe of the Koran, and then add the interpretative history of 1400 years of Muslim action, there is nothing we can find in this collection of memes to immunize the Islamic universe from the outgrowth of suicide terrorism.
No, the only thing that can save Islam is to allow for evolution. It must tear down its walls of isolation and finality and interact with the memes of the rest of the world. If it continues to interact with reality as a self-sufficient ideology, the falsification of this religion as an evolutionary strategy will accelerate, and the world will get much worse for the Muslims. Not that evolution will be easy, either. The diehards are correct: if Islam walks out of the cave and lets in the sunshine, a good amount of accepted doctrine will probably be selected for extinction.
Our hopes in avoiding an all out war lies with the moderates: will they choose the harshness of the sun, or will they proudly go down with the ship?
Palestinian Muslims -- no Palestinian Christians have committed a suicide bombing -- have created a religious and moral basis for mass murder and did so within a worldwide religion with a billion adherents. When the Palestinians sent brainwashed young men to blow themselves up in Israeli buses, cafes and discos, they offered justifications that provided the basis for many others to do the same.
More than any other cause, I believe the reason behind Islam's impotence in controlling this mutative virus is that the memetic arsenal of Islam claims to be complete and self-sufficient, but it clearly is not. If we look just to the constrained ideological universe of the Koran, and then add the interpretative history of 1400 years of Muslim action, there is nothing we can find in this collection of memes to immunize the Islamic universe from the outgrowth of suicide terrorism.
No, the only thing that can save Islam is to allow for evolution. It must tear down its walls of isolation and finality and interact with the memes of the rest of the world. If it continues to interact with reality as a self-sufficient ideology, the falsification of this religion as an evolutionary strategy will accelerate, and the world will get much worse for the Muslims. Not that evolution will be easy, either. The diehards are correct: if Islam walks out of the cave and lets in the sunshine, a good amount of accepted doctrine will probably be selected for extinction.
Our hopes in avoiding an all out war lies with the moderates: will they choose the harshness of the sun, or will they proudly go down with the ship?
posted by John Aristides at 9:49 AM
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