Comment by joules77
3 days ago
In the seminaries of the world they don't teach how to make up clever stories to entrap people. For that you go to Marketing, PR or Sales school. And ofcourse the people who come out of these schools think they are very clever because they sold some widgets or politicians to the masses by some deadline.
But have you heard of a sales org or a marketing dept that has been running for thousand years? They barely ever survive few decades as a coherent unit if ever.
For the curious go check what the neighborhood seminary teaches.
The Church (and all other religious systems) haven't stood for thousands of year through the fall of empires, nations, civil wars, revolutions, plagues, famines, collapse of economic systems, internal schisms, enlightenment, progress in science/tech etc because of the stories they tell.
In fact the stories have been rewritten, branched, mutated, merged with other stories thousands of times to the point we have thousands of different versions of these stories. There is no "narrative domination".
The Church has survived because when people Suffer due to the fall of empire/nations/banks/economies, war, plagues, famine, disasters etc where else do people go?
Do they all head to house of the local system analyst/graph theorist?
So what about the checks notes tens if not hundreds of thousands of religions and religious belief structures that have fallen apart since the inception of humanity?
This is some very weird survivor bias.
Also, philosophically, a the whole of organized religion is "clever stories to entrap people" from a non-believer's standpoint.
I would certainly like to compare the proportion of memetic* material in the IP of religious vs commercial orgs that are holdovers from more than 700 years ago.
*(equivalent to "genetic" in bio organisms)
Archaic phrasings and occurrences of latin should be ignored to make it more balanced :) yep the survivor bias is quite.. a thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival