An interesting question is, given the general failure of brainwashing, how do new religions manage to take hold, like Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Sikhism, etc.? How come Christian and Islamic proselytism has been so consistently successful in many parts of the world?
These are good questions, and as you can imagine, much debated in the literature, with explanations ranging from acts of God (the paradigmatic example being the Jew quoted in Acts of the Apostles arguing that Christianity didn’t need to be suppressed because if it flourished, it must be favored by God, and it would fail if it was disfavored by him) to enabling effective society coordination (particularly attractive for Islam: the horsebacked nomads managed to coordinate under Mohammed rather than feud, and did as well as the Mongols, with conversion then following from personal advantage and to escape dhimmitude) to arguments that it’s just random drift (Carrier points out that the best estimates of the sizes of early Christianity as tiny even centuries after Jesus then necessarily imply that the annual growth rate must have been far tinier than commonly assumed).
My uneducated guess is that it is because Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Judaism were all backed by governments and military forces during the initial stages of expansion. I don’t believe there are any large religions for which this is not true—Hinduism is too old for us to say much about its origins, but there was a time when Buddhism was becoming extremely popular, and power was involved in re-establishing Hinduism.
If I’m right, then the thing that causes small memeplexes to become big memeplexes is the successful conversion of a few powerful and influential people (and that process happens through random drift in the case of religion)
Also, I think Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are the only religions which care about whether or not you believe them. (As in, members think that belief itself has consequences and so they aught to care what others believe). It’s harder to leave these religions, with shadows of hell hanging over you. I think that in most other religions, people can sort of vaguely redirect worship from one set of symbols to another without really rejecting old beliefs and accepting new ones in a way that is consistent with “brainwashing”—it’s more or less immaterial which religion they are following. I’ve got relatives who pray to little pictures of Jesus along with other Hindu idols, and I don’t think they realize how odd this would seem to a Christian. The notion that deviation from a religious orthodoxy is bad tends to be absent, and I imagine that this makes conversion easier.
Typically, a conversion sticks because an organization provides value to its members.
People do get value from religion. The big two seem to be social conformity and fear of death, but there are others. The only atheist that I personally know who converted to Christianity got a wife out of the deal.
The general answer seems to be that religions (just like “total” political parties) provide value for money, in particular a social environment. Friends, baby sitters, group activities, help when you lose a job or someone dies. I think academics, in particular, tend to be such loners, and to be content with such social support as is provided by the government, that they radically underestimate how hungry people are for this sort of social interaction.
An interesting question is, given the general failure of brainwashing, how do new religions manage to take hold, like Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Sikhism, etc.? How come Christian and Islamic proselytism has been so consistently successful in many parts of the world?
These are good questions, and as you can imagine, much debated in the literature, with explanations ranging from acts of God (the paradigmatic example being the Jew quoted in Acts of the Apostles arguing that Christianity didn’t need to be suppressed because if it flourished, it must be favored by God, and it would fail if it was disfavored by him) to enabling effective society coordination (particularly attractive for Islam: the horsebacked nomads managed to coordinate under Mohammed rather than feud, and did as well as the Mongols, with conversion then following from personal advantage and to escape dhimmitude) to arguments that it’s just random drift (Carrier points out that the best estimates of the sizes of early Christianity as tiny even centuries after Jesus then necessarily imply that the annual growth rate must have been far tinier than commonly assumed).
My uneducated guess is that it is because Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Judaism were all backed by governments and military forces during the initial stages of expansion. I don’t believe there are any large religions for which this is not true—Hinduism is too old for us to say much about its origins, but there was a time when Buddhism was becoming extremely popular, and power was involved in re-establishing Hinduism.
If I’m right, then the thing that causes small memeplexes to become big memeplexes is the successful conversion of a few powerful and influential people (and that process happens through random drift in the case of religion)
Also, I think Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are the only religions which care about whether or not you believe them. (As in, members think that belief itself has consequences and so they aught to care what others believe). It’s harder to leave these religions, with shadows of hell hanging over you. I think that in most other religions, people can sort of vaguely redirect worship from one set of symbols to another without really rejecting old beliefs and accepting new ones in a way that is consistent with “brainwashing”—it’s more or less immaterial which religion they are following. I’ve got relatives who pray to little pictures of Jesus along with other Hindu idols, and I don’t think they realize how odd this would seem to a Christian. The notion that deviation from a religious orthodoxy is bad tends to be absent, and I imagine that this makes conversion easier.
People do get value from religion. The big two seem to be social conformity and fear of death, but there are others. The only atheist that I personally know who converted to Christianity got a wife out of the deal.
The general answer seems to be that religions (just like “total” political parties) provide value for money, in particular a social environment. Friends, baby sitters, group activities, help when you lose a job or someone dies. I think academics, in particular, tend to be such loners, and to be content with such social support as is provided by the government, that they radically underestimate how hungry people are for this sort of social interaction.