Religion as transmittable mental illness

Every religion embodies the personality of its founder. Think of any faith as a kind of mind uploading. The founder embodies his personality and deepest beliefs within it. From that point forward everyone who studies the faith, and believes its tenets, acquires a portion of that persons mind, in essence, making the religious founder partially immortal, but only in a mental sense.

Great literature, religious scriptures, architecture, and even computer codes, act as forms of immortality. A thousand years from now the person who created the C family of computer codes may still have his creation operating on machines around the world, making some small part of him immortal. Even if the future galactic empire uses a radically different cryptocurrency than bitcoin, the concept of the blockchain itself may live forever.

This is information immortality. DNA is itself an example of this. So is faith.

And just like the DNA of a virus, religion replicates itself in populations. Since religious people consistently, (and tragically), outreproduce atheists in every era, any religion serves as a genetic carrier for its adherents propagation. A religion transmits the personality of its founder, rendering him partially information immortal. It propagates the DNA of its host population, enhancing fitness while introducing neurosis, religious war, and self-destructive behaviors. Religion itself is information immortal, and in the case of the Jews, it give them a racial information immortality by encoding their ethnic history in a written record bound to their faith.

The pattern of information immortality relies on replication from one mind to the next, generation after generation. Faith undergoes informational mutation, followed by political and marketplace natural selection. Informational immortality selects for virulence, stripping away nuance so as to be palatable to the weakest mind. Every church is in marketplace competition with every other for congregants. The church that refuses to ordain women or practice gay marriage finds itself pushed out of the market as its competitors gain adherents at its expense. Only monopolies of faith and theocratic political hegemony can guard against this. Of course, binding any religion to the fate of a nation potentially binds it to extinction. What is politically correct today might not be tomorrow -- a faith that mutates to suite a dying political regime may evolve into a dead end.

Christianity will always be the mother of the next version of communism. Christ was a homeless hippie, and wherever his religion goes, secular leftism is sure to follow. Islam will always propagate violence, and nations that let Muslims within their borders will suffer ten-thousand years of conflict as a result, (or however long it takes for Islam to go extinct).

(Of course Islam could be made extinct in less than three-hundred years with a worldwide one-child policy against them, and ban on Muslim proselytizing.) Seriously, fuck them all to death.

Really all religions need to go extinct, but Islam especially. If humans ever develop an artificial uterus it will become possible to disconnect humanity from natural selection. When that happens the ability of a people to reproduce will no longer be tied to the natural pattern of information immortality coupled with DNA reproduction of its adherents. Humans have had religion so long they no longer posses the ability to form stable above break-even reproductive groups without faith. The information parasite, that is, the transmittable mental illness that constitutes religion proper, is so utterly bound to humanity, that social groups without it die off. When artificial gestation becomes possible it will also be possible for atheists to order up thousands of babies from the factory. Bye bye faith. And honestly, good riddance.

In the future the ability of a group to propagate itself will be based on its wealth and dedication to growth. A sufficiently fanatical group with a powerful ideology could dominate the world, one-child limit all of their enemies to extinction, and propagate themselves in genesis-like conquest. This is the essence of accelerationism -- a techno-industrial process subverting and destroying the natural order, replacing natural selection with market based and artificial selection. You may not want it, but it certainly wants you, and it's coming.

Of course, if they are wise they will artificially select women with a high desire to reproduce, pushing their genetics into dominance, in order to create a human race that can be sustained solely on the basis of female baby rabies, and not the information parasite of faith. That way, if a cataclysm happens and the fetus factory breaks down, the species has a fallback reproduction strategy. It is never good to breed yourself into a trap of technological dependency.

Whatever the case, the future won't be anything like the past.