Still A Skeptic

One reader expressed "mild horror" at the new site, concerned I "converted" (to religious faith) -- I haven't.
I'm still a skeptic, still an atheist.

But requiring atheism for memetics is a high-cost entry-point.  It restricts memetic theory with ideology, leads many to dismiss it as pseudo-science and creates a stillborn discipline.  This is why the new site emphasizes collaboration across philosophical backgrounds.

Embracing creative, irrational thought can at times be profitable -- it returns more on investment than the dividends of critical thought alone. 

Why not leverage that energy?  Afraid reason can't prevail?

Memetics 1.0 (the memetics of the early 2000s) dismissed religion as a pathogen, unworthy of complex investigation.  It dehumanized religious practitioners -- and it rightly floundered.

When a Jesuit says, "the exercises of Lyola (the founder) helped me fall in love with Jesus" -- why not investigate?  How did this text and community spin-up a Jesus-simulation in the Jesuit's mind? What is the biological scaffold that enables someone to fall in love with a simulation?  How did the human mind evolve the capacity to run personality simulations?

These are questions Religious Studies professors, Psychologists and Sociologists ask (even if they don't couch the question in Computer Science terms).  This is a question many seasoned Jesuits have asked themselves.  Why dismiss reflections and insights and bodies of data....because it doesn't comport with your idea of "rational analysis"?

It is your job to apply rational analysis to complex data sets!