Religion Kills People

A particularly malignant form of the religion virus hit Paris yesterday when three infected individuals, directed by the virus, tried to suppress criticism of it by killing people who made fun of it. This especially virulent strain of the Islam memetic virus, which can control the mind and actions of its victims, making them do things which no sane person would normally do, is reaching epidemic proportions in parts of the world, especially in the Middle East where the population has suffered from various form of it for centuries.

Like other forms of the religion family of memetic viruses, Islam is normally passed on to children when they are at their most susceptible to infection so in many parts of the world, infection rates can reach almost 100% of the population.

The human infant is almost unique in nature being sentient, keen to learn and understand the world around him or her, having good memory recall and having a long childhood. To avoid the danger of overly-curious and sceptical but naive children being easy prey for predators, humans evolved childhood gullibility so parents could teach children almost anything quickly and without the children doubting them. So, for example, children told by their parents to keep away from the water hole where there were crocodiles didn't go to check for themselves.

This gullibility makes human children especially susceptible to religion, especially religions where the parents are tricked into believing they have a duty to infect their children or they risk being badly hurt when they die. This superstition is itself part of the religion virus' replication strategy evolved to ensure it gets passed on to the next generation.

Like all totalitarian ideologies, Islamism is nurtured by fear and frustration.

Preachers of hatred play on these feelings to build the forces with which they can impose a world where liberty is crushed and inequality reigns.

But we say this, loud and clear: nothing, not even despair, justifies choosing darkness, totalitarianism and hatred.

Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present.

Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women, fundamentalists over others.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Chahla Chafiq
Caroline Fourest
Bernard-Henri Levy
Irshad Manji
Mehdi Mozaffari
Maryam Namazie
Taslima Nasreen
Salman Rushdie
Antoine Sfeir
Philippe Val
Ibn Warraq

Published in Charlie Hebdo 1 March 2006

The fact that religion is a mind-controlling virus which, like other virus parasites, merely uses its host for its own purposes to get itself replicated, can be seen in examples such as the Paris killings yesterday and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center where humans are killed for the sake of the virus just as the ebola virus kills humans simply to get itself replicated. The human brain can even be converted into a guidance system for a flying bomb by it. All it takes is a belief that killing certain people is a good thing and that the murderers can expect a suitable reward after they die.

Like any other parasite, the needs of the virus are paramount; the human carrier is a mere utility serving no other purpose but to produce more viruses. Like a snake-oil seller, any subterfuge to trick its victims will do. The only test is whether it works or not. There is no morality involved. The Islam virus even teaches people that 'life' is a mere cage from which death liberates them, so inducing them to willingly waste their one opportunity to experience the world but instead to use it preparing for something better later and to get that by serving the Islam virus.

Virus 1: Human 0.

At the moment it might be tempting to look at the two major classes of the religion virus - Christianity and Islam - and assume the latter is much more virulent and willing to kill its hosts along with other humans to get itself propagated but, in the long term, this does an injustice to the Christian form which, as history shows, has actually been a much more prolific killer, even joyfully killing sufferers of slight variations of itself in order to win the struggle for dominance. The deadliest rivals for any memeplex are, of course, different alleles of the same memeplex because they are in direct competition with one another.

Of the two, Christianity has been the most successful as it subverted one culture after another across the world, killing those who opposed it and forcibly converting people, relegating them to second and third class status, selling them into slavery, confiscating their land and hoovering up their natural resources. Even rival alleles of the Christian memeplex have indulged in frequent periods of mutual killings, each thinking up more and more gruesome ways of killing people in mass slaughters in order to ensure its own dominance in any given area.

The only thing which can unite different strains of the religion meme is a direct threat to the survival of the viruses themselves and to their methods of transmission. For example, all forms of it would vigorously resist the idea that religion is in fact a pathological virus from which we should be trying to rid ourselves and inoculate our children against. Notice how almost every form of it insists on being closely involved in childhood 'education' and how insistent they are that this 'education' should include deliberate infection with religion.

In nearby Oxford we have a little reminder of how victims of the Catholic and Protestant forms of the Christian virus used to indulge in these periods of mutual slaughter in the form of an insignificant crude little cross built into the cobbles that once formed the surface of Broad Street which then ran around the outside the the Medievel city wall. This marks the spot where the Protestant 'Oxford Martyrs' were burned at the stake by the Catholics who were then in charge and were desperately trying to expunge the Protestant form which had recently had great success in replacing Catholicism in the minds of its victims, albeit by using similar methods of persecution, coercion, forced conversion and killing lots of prominent examples and threatening others.

Around the corner at the southern end of St Giles is the Victorian Martyrs' Memorial erected to commemorate this brutality which, with not even a hint of irony, has a Christian cross on it. As with the cross in the road, it's almost exactly like the winning virus is proclaiming its victory.

A direct descendant of this memetic rivalry blighted the lives of the people of Northern Ireland for much of the latter half of the 20th-Century when 3000 people were killed for no gain whatsoever. It was not until people began to realise that religious rivalry had given them nothing but pain and misery, and offered only a bleak future of more of the same, that they put aside their religious rivalry and began to work together for a better future for humans, albeit a future in which the religion viruses are having a harder time being propagated and more people are developing immunity to them and so are no longer infecting their unfortunate children.

The hysterically murderous attempt to suppress free speech in Paris yesterday highlights the basic insecurity of Islam in that so much of its power derives from the mystique and carefully orchestrated sacred reputation of Muhammad and the book he allegedly wrote, and which Muslims are required to believe came from an invisible magic god they call Allah. The entire religion hangs on that single unsubstantiated and unprovable thread which so has to be protected at all costs. Any hint of criticism, mockery or questioning had to be vigorously repressed and any hint that the Qur'an just might not be the words of Allah but the words of a man is considered a blasphemy deserving only the harshest of penalties. Criticism and dissent must be silenced at all costs lest it encourages people to question that basic assumption.

The clerics know the claim is tenuous at best and I suspect whoever actually compiled the Qur'an knew that, hence special emphasis on defending the character and reputation of Mohammed. They knew full well that, once people start to question that, they are questioning the entire basis of Islam, and of course, since it hangs so precariously on such an insubstantial thread, the entire thing would quickly fall down. One wonders just how many sceptics are keeping well in the closet in countries where even hinting to a close friend that you don't find the claims entirely convincing and that you find magic hard to believe in, can earn you the death penalty. The cat must be firmly locked into the bag with no possibility of it getting out.

Just think of the jobs, the power and the control over the people and the fruits of their labour that this would entail.

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