http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-141...

An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as "religious headgear".

Niko Alm first applied for the licence three years ago after reading that headgear was allowed in official pictures only for confessional reasons.

Mr Alm said the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism.

...


The idea came into Mr Alm's noodle three years ago as a way of making a serious, if ironic, point.


...

Ramen, brother.

The idea of memetics as an explanation for the...tenacity of modern religions appeals to me. WTF is a meme, you ask? Richard Dawkins popularized the concept of memes as a sort of cultural analog to genes, a meme originally being defined as a fundamental unit of cultural information*. The scope of the meme has grown since to be roughly analogous to any idea that can be well-defined and transmitted from one person to another. A successful meme (in this case, a religion) does one or more of the following:

1) It spurs its adherents to spread itself continually
2) It demands a high degree of accuracy in this replication, that is, orthodoxy.
3) It commandeers several powerful biological drivers of behavior, including the deep-seated need to belong to a larger group, survival instinct, and sexual drives.
4) It commands its adherents to attack and remove roadblocks to further transmission, including unbelievers and heretics.

It only makes sense that the longer human civilization and mass communication exist, the more powerful such ideas will become due to selection pressure, which is ironic considering many of those religions are hostile to the idea (lolz). This list is not maximally inclusive, there are other, lesser drivers of behavior that they can take advantage of as well. Less dangerous memes include rickroll and lolcats, which spread because they are amusing rather than all-consuming, and the science of physics, which spreads because it reflects the state of the material world and provides useful tools.

Look at the top ten religions in the world. Most of them carry grave consequences for unbelievers, including some form of severe punishment for unbelief in the afterlife. The remainder are closely tied to national or local identities, which seem to be a weaker sort of meme. Once your nation is kaput, the national religion tends to go, too, if it doesn't have a strong evangelistic element. There aren't so many Azadis and Zoroastrians around anymore. Likewise, The UU and Episcopal churches, which seem immanently reasonable compared to their fundamentalist brethren, are having a hard time with recruitment and retention, possibly for those very reasons. Being reasonable seems to hurt the "fitness" of a religion in some way.

Even here, among like-minded souls with regards to virtually anything else, you can come under severe attack for questioning the beliefs of another, even gently. Again, in the view of memetics, unbelievers should be willing to have patience, since these strong emotional responses are a sort of self-defense mechanism. A meme that could be overwritten by a quiet conversation among strangers wouldn't last very long in the volatile churn of human imagination. When people say "Dude, why can't we just believe X and get along." well, that's why.

In this view, fundamentalists aren't just obnoxious busybodies actively choosing to ruin your day, they are the unwitting victims of a bad idea made potent by millennia of evolutionary success. Brushing it off is probably easier for me, though, since I grew up with them, am a white man, and can pass as "normal."

Does this seem reasonable to you all?

*(the exact definition is of "meme" is a point of debate since there is no clear way to define a cultural information analogue to the gene as a fundamental unit of genetic information. This is the primary reason that mimetics has never developed into more than a protoscience. However, the notion that ideas can be shaped by selection pressures as they are transmitted through a society can stand on its own, IMO.)

Fuck you if you think that you can rule people with fear and guilt. People didn't vote in 2010 for a reason, and it wasn't to prove some point to Obama. It was because they think the system is broken, and believe no number of elected Democrats can fix it. We were fucked three ways from Sunday when we had both houses of Congress and the Presidency, while Bush got through his god damn tax cuts with 50 senators plus Cheney. We couldn't even let them expire!

We're still being wiretapped.
People are still being tortured in our name.
People are dying of preventable diseases.
There are still two pointless bloody wars killing entire families for no reason other than idiot pride.
People are still being stripped of their rights.
No one is doing anything about it except the people themselves.

Until you can convince the non-voters that their vote will mean something, then all of the self-righteous internet posts in the world won't change that, and Democrats will continue to lose at the polls.

You could as easily tell a depressed person to "cheer up."

And like them, I will tell you exactly where to put that advice.

PS: A hearty FUCK YOU to everyone questioning people's loyalty to the party, too.

PPS: People who voted in Florida in 2000 know exactly what I'm talking about.

your attempt to play victim on behalf of our gender is laughable.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hea... /

* Reduce costs — Rising health care costs are crushing the budgets of governments, businesses, individuals, and families, and they must be brought under control
* Guarantee choice — Every American must have the freedom to choose their plan and doctor – including the choice of a public insurance option
* Ensure quality care for all — All Americans must have quality and affordable health care