In case you missed it in the comments on the previous post, here, courtesy of Rob G, is David Bentley Hart's extremely sharp, in every sense of the word, commentary on a book in which Daniel Dennett explains the phenomenon of religion to us, and advises us as to how to rid civilization of it. It's particularly enjoyable (and impressive) for its succinct demolition of the pseudo-scientific concept of the "meme," which is, in brief, an idea which takes on a life of its own. Dennett, following Richard Dawkins, takes this metaphor literally, and supposes that memes tend toward their own preservation in the same mechanistic way that genes are said to. From this the Dawkins school professes to be able to study culture as one studies biology. But

Unfortunately, all evolutionary stories about culture suffer from certain inherent problems. Evolutionary biology is a science that investigates chains of physical causation and the development of organic life, and these are all it can investigate with any certainty. The moment its principles are extended into areas to which they are not properly applicable, it begins to cross the line from the scientific to the speculative. This is fine, perhaps, so long as one is conscious from the first that one is proceeding in stochastic fashion and by analogy, and that one's conclusions will always be unable to command anyone's assent. When, though, those principles are translated into a universal account of things that are not in any definable way biological or physically causal, they have been absorbed into a kind of impressionistic mythology, or perhaps into a kind of metaphysics, one whose guiding premises are entirely unverifiable.

It's a measure of the materialist's determination to stick to his dogmas that anyone would advance the "meme" idea in the name of science.