Evangelism thread. The rent that humans pay to beliefs. The arduous and challenging task of spreading your belief to others. If a memeplex is a body then evangelism compulsion is the reproductive organ of that body.

Evangelism is hard, especially “cold” evangelism. It becomes similar to pickup artistry, an effort of salesmanship. Most have neither the stomach nor the head for it. The easiest way for a religion to spread is through inheritance, but memetic virality can be even more powerful.

Parents pass on memes to their children the same way that mothers pass on their gut flora. These organisms are fellow travelers, partly symbiotic. The easiest way to make more Christians is for Christians to have children.

But in addition to “be fruitful and multiply”, Christians also have “go ye therefore into all the world”. But every religious practice has its imperative to spread

Missionaries who dig wells and build schools are investing in the fertility of poor, faraway places as a way to memetically capture their children, trading capital to propagate ideology

Devout Jews wander crowded public places looking for non-practicing ethnic Jews to bring back into the fold

Islam spreads by the sword, imposing jizya upon nonbelievers, incentivizing them to convert with social and economic pressure. Christians conquer through a kind of domineering generosity, muslims through war and invasion

In the past, Christians also spread through conquest. Constantine is probably the most famous example.

Scientologists set up reading rooms and offer free dianetics analysis, “personality tests” and other forms of consultation that appear to be a kind of psychotherapy or medical intervention

Marxists exploit an idiosyncrasy of developmental psychology, teaching a doctrine of seizing the property of the rich, appealing to young people at a time in their life when they have little property, when they most covet the possessions of their elders

Neoliberalism retards birth rates, so it requires constant geographical churn in order to sustain itself. It spreads with a two pronged strategy: capture of the Prussian school system and embedded morality parables in children’s cartoons

Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons both send out door-to-door salesman to evangelize to bored housewives, the unemployed, the recently migrated and culturally disconnected, and anyone who happens to be at home during daytime hours while riding an emotional low

CrossFitters are on average really good looking and for some reason they won’t shut up about CrossFit, so they don’t have to evangelize consciously. How do you know if someone does CrossFit? Oh don’t worry, they’ll tell you etc.

Vegans put out pamphlets, post pictures of cute food animals on the internet, make enticing YouTube videos about their food, invite their friends to vegan restaurants, and spread dubious ecofear. They make vegan starter kits and PETA acts out disgusting pro-vegan spectacles

Rationalists and neoreactionaries make converts by writing alienating and esoteric texts and publishing them on blogs, waiting for high iq types to wander into their labyrinths of the mind

Buddhists host free meditation retreats, but at least in Western countries they are not pushy about it. Historically they have also made converts using legal capture

Street preachers of all varieties deliver sermons in public squares, via radio and television, and now they also evangelize via social media, posting to YouTube and SoundCloud and yes, even Twitter dot com.

We all long to spread our memeplex because we know that in the ideological arena, the fight is zero sum. If it comes down to it, it’s us or them. In concert with this need, our religious practices give shape and method to extract unequivocal ideological submission from outsiders.

Be honest with yourself: regarding the (libs/reactionaries/capitalists/communists/Christians/atheists/Muslims/$OTHER), they absolutely have to go, whether we purge them by the book or the sword or the condom or the CRISPR or the bomb.