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We also had the problem with the database earlier this month, so some of these comments aren't available in their original context. However I am reposting the comments themselves below; it's not a perfect solution, but in various ways it beats the alternatives I could think of. That said, if you find any errors in need of correction (misattributed comments, for example) please feel free to @ me. The number of copy/paste errors I made in the process of trying to put this together is... not small.
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Notes -
@felis-parenthesis's original comment:
I want natural selection to also apply to God. That is: there are multiple "gods"="meme space egregores" inhabiting the noosphere. Humans are symbionts. They live in symbiosis with meme-space egregores. The humans provide the egregores with the information processing substrate that the egregores (live on | live in | need in order to exist). In return the egregores help humans two ways. They transform human individual intelligence into human group intelligence. They stop intelligence self-destructing.
Is intelligence a good thing? Robinson Crusoe on his desert island had better be clever or he is not going to survive. That is the man-versus-nature context and intelligence is purely positive. But most of the time we live in groups, creating a man-versus-man context. Individual intelligence is what makes you defect in a prisoners dilemma. On its own, more intelligence means more treachery and back-stabbing. Think Lebanon. The Lebanese are intelligent; but in the sense of willy and cunning. Goes badly.
The key observation is the travellers dilemma
We notice individual intelligence turning a tricky situation into a tragedy. We do much better as members of a group, all of us sacrificing for the benefit of the group, and doing well individually through membership of a thriving group. Our egregore orchestrates this transformation of individual intelligence into group intelligence by existing as the ideology to which we submit and which binds us together.
Human rationality isn't really a thing because humans live in groups and what is rational for each individual is in conflict with what is rational for the group.
Meanwhile the human body has animal origins and the human race exists through instincts. Broodiness and lust. Broodiness: we want children so we have sex. Lust: instinctive and pleasurable, children come automatically.
But humans are clever, so we invent contraception and get to enjoy sex without having children and the human race dies out. Maybe broodiness comes to the rescue, maybe not. But while we are inventing contraception we are also inventing super-tasty food and getting too fat for sex. Being clever generally leads to subverting instinctive reward systems and self-destructing. A good egregore teaches us eudaimonia instead of hedonism. It saves us, and since we are its substrate, it saves itself. Symbiosis both ways.
I mean the religious technology is pretty simple. It’s a group that believes in a central text that contains morals and further believes that the book is 100% true and cannot and will not be altered. The reason most other things ultimately fail is that the text is alter able and therefore cannot hold as a standard for group behavior. The first entryist who alters the religious texts gets his way, and therefore it cannot provide the stability that society needs.
I prefer a zoomed in view of religious technology in which the details are subtle and difficult to get right. There are interesting thoughts in a post to /r/neology claiming that Islam and Marxism are both examples of a certain kind of thing, more specific than religion or ideology (and asking r/neology to invent a word for it)
The central text must hit
So I agree with you that the religious technology works by insisting that the text is 100% true and cannot be altered. But that is a tricky constraint.
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