Skeptics, atheists and meme theory
By Rodrigo Neely
Article ID: 1213
“Naysayer!”
“Why do you want to take away people’s beliefs?!”
“You’re just narrow minded!”
“You give off bad vibes!”
The above are all accusations any skeptic at work can expect to hear. In fact, I suggest that if you are a skeptic and you have not heard these accusations, you are not doing your job.
There is a vast network of skeptical organizations. Every major city in the US must have one, and smaller cities would find themselves well supported to start one. In addition to the giants such as the James Randi Educational Foundation, and Center for Inquiry, smaller groups litter the globe.
If you are enraged and frustrated by the prevalence of pseudoscience in our society, then there are plenty of ways for you to get involved in skeptical activism.
In fact, skeptical activism can be as simple as talking about the website you are on right now.
Once you engage the world as a skeptic, there are many issues that will become extremely prevalent. If you are already an active skeptic, read this and know these challenges are being addressed by us all.
Atheism is going to come up. Like it or not, if you are a skeptic and you socialize with other skeptics, you will encounter atheists. I have yet to meet a skeptic activist in person who is neither atheist nor agnostic. But I have seen them on the internet, like a rare species right out of cryptozoology. Yet, we as skeptics do not know what to do with atheism. It’s like the communist specter from Carl Marx, but instead of brewing among the workers, its brewing among the skeptics. Many of us are atheists, and we think that there is too much religion in the world, and it’s intellectually dishonest to doubt ghosts while faithfully embracing with the “Holy Ghost”.
Many skeptics think embracing atheism as integral to skepticism makes us ineffective consumer advocates. Atheism carries a terrible stigma in society. Most people report they could not elect an otherwise qualified atheist president. This is scary. Perhaps it is better that skepticism stay in the atheist closet.
If you thought atheism was hard to get around, wait until you deal with the academy. What is the academy? Universities. As a skeptic, you will have to deal with college professors, their egos, social ineptitudes, tendencies to bore people, and somehow try to get somewhere with them. James Randi immortalized this sentiment by saying, “Some kinds of stupidity, you have to have a PhD to achieve.”
Yet, it is the academy we ultimately defend. At least the scientific academy, because we work towards the public embracing science as the way to tell what is true. The academy yields fruit for us. One delicious apple from the tree of knowledge is Susan Blackmore’s meme theory.
Susan Blackmore did not coin meme theory; this was done by Richard Dawkins. But one need only read the comments in Blackmore’s book The Meme Machine
Still unclear? Think of a game of “telephone”, and how the message radically changes from one end of the game to another. This is meme theory at work. It gets really interesting if you start to add competing messages to the game of telephone, and some messages die out as triumphant memes infect human hosts. This is a falsifiable scientific theory.
As skeptics, I suggest we must become Dr. Blackmore’s research assistants as we begin to deal with our issues in the context of meme theory.
Is atheism something we shouldn’t discuss in skeptical activism? Can atheism - a strong meme - be in an environment in which it is triumphant? If we start thinking of things this way, we could find our ideas spreading faster and better.
Whatever strategy you take as a skeptic in the world, know that our duty is to always advance. Always inform, and never recede. It’s a takeover, a war, but the weapons are thoughts that spread like viruses. Viruses are just genes in a box, thoughts that spread are memes. Memetic engineering is the way we can gain some ground.
Either way, fellow skeptics, I salute you.
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Critical Critique:
Thanks for sharing this Rod. The funny thing is, I’ve also met some atheist, who may not believe in the existence of a God(s) yet they do believe is ghosts and the paranormal, simply because they could not explain an experience they have had. Instead of researching the experience further to find out what exactly had occurred through science and reason, they come to an immediate conclusion like any theist would do to. While believers of religion have their God of the Gaps, these kind of atheists have their Ghosts of the Gaps. Both of these groups still share a similar form of thinking, it’s just that they believe in different things with different kind of names, just like different religions with different kinds of Gods. However, ultimately, they are all still the same though they are with different names and characteristics. And all the believers of such things are still extremely lacking effective critical thinking skills.
19 March 2008, 5:40 pmRodrigo Neely:
Yes,
I’m afraid your right. There are definitely atheists who are not skeptics. But I think the reverse is rare, I think most skeptics are atheists.
19 March 2008, 6:09 pmCritical Critique:
Mostly, yes. Agreed.
19 March 2008, 7:19 pm