Doesnt religion as a wide spread phenomenon indicate anything?
It indicates that religions have attributes that have allowed them to spread to the level we see today. The theory of memetics? is concerned with memes?, which are sets of ideas that can spread themselves in the consciousness of humans in a way that is analogous to the way genes relate to the body. Some atheists see religion as a particularly successful parasitic meme, which spreads by convincing the host to convert others. Some memes avoid destruction by keeping the host from questioning the doctrine or by using peer pressure to keep the believer from admitting his/her mistake. Some religious memes even encourage their host to destroy the hosts of competing memes. From this point of view, theres no special virtue connected with the successful spread of a meme. Religion is no more, a good thing, based on the number of people who believe in it, than disease is a good thing because of the number of people who are inflicted. The memetic point of view has very little to say on the truth of
