#11 Religion & The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Analyzing how religions spread and conjecturing about "the best religion".

Jan 18, 2024

Meme complexes, like religions, political ideologies, and scientific theories, spread like viruses. That is not to say that they are always harmful. Even viruses in biology can be good. Bacteriophages, for example, are small viruses that infect and eliminate harmful bacteria. Religions can lead to immensely productive collaborative behavior and provide a sense of purpose, belonging, and community. Many have argued that ‘Christianity Built Western Civilization’ as suggested in the book of the name by Dr. Alex Locay.

However, religions can also lead to the suppression of freedom and criticism.

How Religions Spread

Strategies

Now let’s look at the most common religions through this lens of virology. First of all, all religions employ these strategies to spread:

Moral framework: They offer useful guidance as to which behavior is encouraged and which is prohibited. Historically, they fostered a decentralized form of jurisdiction before institutionalized control of violence was invented or available. In Islam, this framework is called Sharia Law.
Mutation: Religions spread by mutating to adapt to the current moral knowledge and cultural norms of a society. For instance, usury came to be defined as “excessive interest”. Almost 25% of marriages within the Christian faith end in divorce, even though Jesus forbids it.

Child-age instruction: Children are more susceptible to accepting ideas they are told by authorities, as their ability to criticize theories is still developing.
Political influence-seeking: Sir Arthur C. Clark wrote: "It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” Similarly, ever since Mohammed's initial conquests, his was a political religion. Another example is the Christian Orthodox religion dominating the Russian government, which banned Protestant Churches like the Jehovah’s Witnesses from Moscow. Even America, though its constitution limits the role of religion in the government (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”), is united by a Protestant-theology-inspired American Civil Religion. The motto “In God We Trust” provides spiritual backing for the currency. The pledge of allegiance recited by schoolchildren describes the republic as “one nation united under God”.
Controlling fertility: The rate of reproduction is a critical parameter of existence, especially among primitive societies, and religions are a potent means of regulating fertility. Religious practice usually causes an increase in fertility. Having too few people makes a group vulnerable to attack from more populous neighbors.
Guilt: Because many religions prohibit certain behaviors, when a person violates these prohibitions, they are made to feel guilty. This brings the person even closer to their religion.

Christianity

Priests and Monks: They are forbidden from having children so that they may maintain focus on propagating the religion. This is genetic suicide for the priest's genes but serves the virus that is Catholic religion.
Funding: Christianity encourages donating to the church, i.e. to institutions that spread and fortify the religion.
Financial aid with caveats: Christian institutions often offer a number of supporting services for the poor, such as homeless shelter, medical aid, or education. However, these services are usually only available for people that are already part of, or are willing to join, the religion.
Evangelism: Christianity places a strong emphasis on evangelism, or spreading the faith to non-believers, which helps propagate the religion.
Science: Societies that focus on knowledge creation prosper and proliferate. So does their religion. In Ecclesiasticus 42:21, it is written that “[God] has imposed an order on the magnificent works of his wisdom.” This and other passages gave Catholic scientists faith that God had created an explainable, quantifiable universe. Investigation into the workings of reality became a spiritual endeavor. More on this in Logan’s piece, Did the Catholic Church Give Birth to Science?

Islam

Punishing apostates: the extreme form of this is “honor killing”. (Honor killings are also common for gay people in Palestine).
Arabic Language: The use of Arabic in prayers and religious texts creates a sense of unity among Muslims worldwide, regardless of their native language.
Jihad: This term appears frequently in the Quran and in the Hadith. While modernist Islamic scholars have emphasized the defensive and non-military (spiritual and moral) aspects of jihad, in classical Islamic law (sharia), the term refers to armed struggle against unbelievers. Of the 199 hadith references to jihad in the Bukhari collection of hadith, all assume that jihad means warfare.
Limiting rights of woman: Women have fewer rights and less worth according to traditional Quran interpretations. Limiting their rights, including their education, reduces their ability to criticize their oppressors.
Woman hair-display & fertility control: Long hair is a strong signal of health and fertility1. The mandate for women to wear a hijab in the in presence of non-related men might have originated to limit woman’s ability to advertise their sexuality. Secondly, Traditional Sunni and Shia Islamic marital jurisprudence allows Muslim men to be married to multiple women (a practice known as polygyny). This, together with additional encouragement by Islamic religious teachings, could have led to a higher fertility rate of 3.1 children per woman, increasing the spread of the religion.
For comparison, Christians have a fertility rate of 2.7 children per woman. While the global average is just 2.5.

Judaism

Vertical Distribution: Judaism is less open to converts. This can be a successful strategy because the community keeps the virus strong and, in turn, the virus binds the community closely together.
Rituals: Judaism, like other religions, has many rituals including dietary laws, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, and Sabbath observance. These solidify the community members’ commitment to their faith.
Questioning: Similar to the Catholic belief of an explicable and ordered nature, Judaism comes with a culture of questioning existing knowledge. The phrase “How do we know this?” appears frequently in Rabbinic literature. Rabbis always had to explain their reasoning.

The Best Religion

Subjectivism, i.e. the belief that there is no objective reality, is wrong. That means that there must be objective truth about the benefits and downsides of a certain religion, given a specific goal.

But what do we want? Moral knowledge is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for.

Karl Popper and David Deutsch have hypothesized that the most fundamental moral truth is to not destroy the means of error correction (the moral imperative).

What kind of Errors? Examples include: bad leaders like dictators that kill civilians, the suppression or degradation of human rights and freedom of 50% of society (including legitimizing rape), forbidding a certain productive behavior like collecting interest.

I conjecture that the worst religion is the one that is most successful in removing the means of error correction.

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