Reason, Religion and Immunization

The most sensational news for me yesterday was that Ahmedanijad, the Iranian President is a Jew. Or at least he was one before his parents converted to Islam. His original name is Sabourjian, Telegraph.co.uk reports.

This might seem impossible, given that he has been denying the holocaust and calling for the destruction of Israel, but may be not necessarily so.

At Less Wrong, is this post- "Reason as memetic immune disorder", which could be of use in making sense of this.

The author poses this question:

"I remember many times growing up when missionaries described the crazy things their new converts in remote areas did on reading the Bible for the first time - they refused to be taught by female missionaries; they insisted on following Old Testament commandments; they decided that everyone in the village had to confess all of their sins against everyone else in the village; they prayed to God and assumed He would do what they asked; they believed the Christian God would cure their diseases. We would always laugh a little at the naivete of these new converts; I could barely hear the tiny voice in my head saying but they're just believing that the Bible means what it says...

"How do we explain the blindness of people to a religion they grew up with?"

And answers it-

"The history of religions sometimes resembles the history of viruses. Judaism and Islam were both highly virulent when they first broke out, driving the first generations of their people to conquer (Islam) or just slaughter (Judaism) everyone around them for the sin of not being them. They both grew more sedate over time. (Christianity was pacifist at the start, as it arose in a conquered people. When the Romans adopted it, it didn't make them any more militaristic than they already were.)

"The mechanism isn't the same as for diseases, which can't be too virulent or they kill their hosts. Religions don't generally kill their hosts. I suspect that, over time, individual selection favors those who are less zealous. The point is that a culture develops antibodies for the particular religions it co-exists with - attitudes and practices that make them less virulent."

I think the post is a most important one, and open a field- may be religious epidemiology or something like that.

Quite impressive, to tell you the truth.