Religion and Memetic Viruses

"What do you think is the essence of Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity... and forces like them?"

Faced with Xi Shenlian's question,

Gu Yun Meiyezi thought for a moment before answering uncertainly:

"Religion combined with certain philosophical ideas?"

The reason she answered this way was that on Earth in the past, so-called religions—aside from those Evil Cults that were beneath notice—mostly leaned more toward spreading certain concepts, ideas, and philosophies... They were somewhat like large-scale academic organizations devoted to philosophy, spending all day discussing human nature, society, civilization, the future...

Because there, the so-called gods were essentially a group of powerful ancient Awakened.

This was something everyone knew.

Therefore, purely religious thought had naturally found it difficult to take root on Earth.

Awakened were rare.

But there were still plenty of them appearing all the time.

If you did not add something philosophical and devoted yourself wholeheartedly to some inexplicable personality cult, everyone would usually regard it as nothing more than some bizarre nonsense born of sheer lunacy.

Mysterious powers?

Born noble?

...What utter bullshit...

As a result, on Earth back then, so-called religions would often naturally evolve into large organizations that studied society, philosophy, morality...

Among them,

the philosophy of persuading people to do good held an absolute advantage.

Compared to all sorts of extremely radical things,

intelligent life—especially intelligent life that preferred living in groups—really did prefer gentler things.

At present, Xi Shenlian quickly affirmed what Gu Yun Meiyezi had said earlier.

"That's more or less it."

"And one of the most direct effects of these two things is increasing identification."

"Increasing an individual's recognition of another individual's ideas or existence."

"To put it simply, they classify. As ideas, they can classify different individuals and sort out all those who can serve as allies."

"More extreme religions can be viewed