Religion
Memeplexes have been employed recently in attempts to understand the phenomenon of religion.
In the case of Christianity, the idea suggests, the Christian memeplex "evolved" based upon the Jewish religious teachings, among others, to eventually form the Catholic church, followed by various schisms leading to the Eastern Orthodox churches and various Protestant churches. In this process, various theologians, political leaders, writers, and religious visionaries have added and deleted individual memes from the Christian memeplex resulting in the formation of new but related memeplexes, or religions/sects. The process of schism, like evolution, is ongoing, and as a result smaller and less differentiated memeplexes have arisen within the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. The same process could be said to be occurring in the case of many sets of belief.
Read more about this topic: Memeplex
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made—no matter how indirectly—to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping presence, who shall dare to come in?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this—that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made—not to understand—but to feel—as crime.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)