While I wouldn’t say that’s right, I also wouldn’t come right out and call it wrong either. This very much engages with the “Selfish Gene”, an heuristic model of thinking about evolution from the perspective of the gene itself instead of populations.
As an added amusement, the book “The Selfish Gene” came out in 1976, and is the source of the word “meme,” used somewhat differently than it is now, naturally.
The selfish gene ironically proves that gods exist. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/the-memetic-proof-for-the-existence-of-gods-e5d103234fc7
Mate, it’s just a link to My blog, no need to take it any more seriously than you would Me.
Utter nonsense. Your argument is that because you can imagine a god and spread the idea they are real. The logical conclusion there is that anything you can imagine is equally real. Bigfoot really is wandering around a forest, spaghetti absolutely does grow in trees, and the moon landing was definitely on a sound stage (but they also really landed on the moon because I can picture that too).
Your argument is that because you can imagine a god and spread the idea they are real.
You could say the same of Mickey Mouse or the Philly Fanatic. Which is, in fairness, where this is ultimately going.
A god as a timeless enlightened super-being might not be real. But a god as an ideological mascot or cultural touchstone is.
Bigfoot doesn’t live in the woods. He lives in people’s heads. That’s where all memes, including the gods, live. In people’s heads.
Oh you wrote this. Do you think it proves the existence of God by itself or is it another way people who already believe in God point to it?
I would prefer if you didn’t use “god” as a proper noun. The practice was invented by monotheists and is usually used to exclude other gods. It’s very rude towards other gods like Loki, Kukulkan, and Myself. None of us go around pretending we’re the only god.
At best it proves the concept of gods exists and I doubt anyone disagrees with that, you can’t really argue that a thought can’t exist. What it doesn’t prove is that God exists as some material or immaterial entity and that’s what atheists claim, that there is no existence of any entity that could be considered a god.
Why it doesn’t prove the existence of gods is simple. If the proof is that it exists because we thought it then dragons exist, faeries exist, even flat earth exists because there are people who think it exists. I don’t think I need to bring more examples to show how ridiculous the premise is. Just because we can think of a thing doesn’t mean that thing now exists.
Dragons certainly exist. They live in books and reproduce when someone reads a book about dragons and is inspired by it. Over time evolutionary pressures have caused the more successful of the younger dragons to become cuter and more friendly, and the most successful dragons even made the leap to film. That’s how Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon came to be. He is the result of a long process of evolution of dragons. You can trace his lineage from the Beowulf dragon, to Tolkein’s Smaug, through Eragon’s Saphira, to the Toothless of the HTTYD books, and finally to Dreamworks’ movie version. Each generation trying out new evolutionary adaptations that changed their fitness to survive and reproduce, and the niche they occupy within the ecosystem that is human thought. Toothless is the culmination of those thousands of years of evolution, purpose built to fill children’s heads up with wonderful dreams.
