I invite (and encourage) the learned membership to challenge and/or find
counterexamples to Jeff's hypothesis.

On 18/9/21 9:43 am, Jeff Zeitlin - editor at freelancetraveller.com (via
tml list) wrote:
>
>> I see you've noted some rank ordering of those three metamemes
>> (Propitiatory / Ethical / Transcendental) already - I'd suspect even a
>> designed religion that lasts long enough (however long that may be)
>> would incorporate (whether by design or evolution) elements from the
>> other metamemes.  Otherwise, it would become an ex-religion, ceasing to
>> be, and whose memetic processes are now only of interest to historians.
> Less a "rank ordering" than an "evolutionary ordering", and I will freely
> admit that such ordering is based on the pattern established here on Earth,
> now and in our past.
>
>> How would a single-metameme-dominant religion, as a class, vary from one
>> where two of them are roughly equal in import?
> Mostly in the style of ritual, and possibly the role of clergy. Both of
> those are to be covered in other sections of the document.
>
> Right now, I just want to make sure that I have an exhaustive (or very
> nearly so) partition of Models (or metamemes, as you've put it).
>
> (Note that "pantheism" actually can fall at both ends of the evolutionary
> model - once you achieve the goal of a transcendental religion, you might
> come to the realization that God Is Everything And Everything Is God,
> putting it at the end of the evolutionary path (post-transcendental
> pantheism) - or it could be at the beginning of the model, where "primitive
> pantheism" comes before you realize that the world works according to
> rules.)
>
>
>
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--
 On further thought, and nicking liberally from Winchell Chung of Atomic
Rockets (who dug upand applied Mendeleev's observation that building a
framework allows you to look for interesting holes), that gives you 7
categories (with somewhat blurry lines between them) of religion - 3
independent binary variables (given metameme dominant or not), trivially
excluding the empty-dominant set.

For a first attempt:

{Propitiatory / Ethical / Transcendental}-dominant - named metameme
dominates the two others;

{Propitiatory / Ethical / Transcendental}-deficient - named metameme is
dominated by the two others roughly equally;

Co-dominant - all three metamemes roughly equally dominant;

I have no idea how the resulting distribution will shake out, barring a
suspicion that a currently co-dominant religion is at an unstable
equlibrium.

_I_ think you've got a solid first cut at a breakdown (am reluctant to
call it a partition, as it's possibly not exhaustive, and the resulting
subsets are explicitly not disjoint).