I februar/mars 2007 utgaven av "Free Inquiry" refereres en liten del av et intervju med Susan Blackmore. Temaet er memer og religion, og jeg ønsker å sitere et lite segment fra intervjuet som jeg synes det er verdt å trekke frem (mine uthevinger):
Free Inquiry: Is religion a meme - or a collection of memes?
Blackmore: Absolutely. Religions are just a set of ideas and behaviours copied from person to person. Very few people on the planet have chosen their religion. They get infected with a religion when they are very young, usually by their parents. Sometimes they get landed with really pernicious memes in that way. One of the awful tricks that the religion memes play is that they tell you if you are religious, you are a good person. I call that the "altruism trick", and think it is really the nastiest trick, because it means somehow that you are not supposed to ever question religions, you are not supposed to tell religious people that their religion is making them do something bad. This helps the meme to keep infecting more people. I think that religious memes are really amongst the nastiest viruses we have on the planet.
Intervjuet med Blackmore, og lassevis med andre spennende tenkere, kan for øvrig høres i sin helhet på www.pointofinquiry.org. Du kan også abbonnere på deres podcast.
