Niche Religion

The concept of "niche" came out of ecology a number of years ago. A niche is a place in the ecological system a species can exploit. It can be a predator who preys on a specific prey or a herbivore that eats a particular plant.

I think of niches from the viewpoint of thermodynamics. All biological systems operate by taking energy of a higher level, absorbing a bit, and emitting a little less energy. Plants take a photon, use a bit of energy to take CO2 and water to make sugar, releasing some energy (heat) in the process. The Krebs Cycle, that venerable biochemical system that derives energy from the burning of sugar, does the same, chewing up two carbons at a time, dumping CO2 and water and a little heat and getting energy in return. The three laws of thermodynamics says you can't win, you can't break even and you can't get out of the game. But that doesn't say you can't make a profit on the trip downhill. Think of the ecology living on the back of an elephant or in the human gut.

It shouldn't be surprising that humans do the same thing economically. Small businesses get their start finding a service or product that is unexploited. Commerce makes money on the transfer of energy whether the energy is represented by product, service or money itself.

I was out in Missouri a couple of weeks ago to the funeral of my brother-in-law. Not being a believer of any kind, it's odd for me to go to funerals. I've been to a lot of funerals in the last two decades: frinds, uncles, aunts, cousins, parents, in-laws of the same sort of relations and, now, brother-in-law. Most of these funerals had a minister of some sort.

On such occaisions, the service and sermon follow a set pattern. Step 1: Comfort the bereaved. This is where heaven comes in. Step 2: Exalt the departed. This can be considered part of step 1 but it is usually separated out. Step 3: Place the event in religious context. These steps can happen in any order. Some steps are infacted at the cost of other steps.

Step 3, which I also call putting grief in harness to a greater good, is the part that pays the salary of the minister. This is the part of the service that shows the necessity of God, the religion, and, by extension, the minister. It's niche exploitation, pure and simple. Grief is the consequence of a thinking monkey observing the death of a loved one. It's as inevitable as a predator/prey relationship. Religion injects itself into the heart of this transaction, serving up comfort and context and taking advantage of the emotions as they transiton from bereavement to acceptance. No differet from a tiger or a tape worm.

When my father died this Baptist minister showed up at the funeral. I didn't invite him. My Mother didn't invite him. My sister didn't invite him. There's some evidence he was brought by my aunt but there's no confirmation.

He comes in, talks a little about my Dad in a way guaranteed to show he had never met him. My Dad had left Baptists far, far behind. He'd become an athiest in the latter days of his life and it made him happier in many ways. He said he felt free.

It was clear the minister had either not been informed of this fact or conveniently chose to ignore it. Since we were not paying him we were not his constituency. I was pretty angry at him at the time but I'm not now. Religion is the parasitic load of culture. We might not like it but it seems that we're stuck with it the same way we're stuck with E. coli STDs.

But thinking of religion in this way has given me a bit of freedom, too. After all, if religion is inevitable, there's nothing to be done about it. Besides, if religions are biologically part of us like an appendix or a tonsil, it means that none of them have any better claim to truth than any other. It's like head lice in schools. It happens.

And if all religions are more or less equal, we shouldn't be so upset with upstarts. After all, a couple of hundred years ago the Mormons were just some personality cult in New England. Now they're a world religion with their own parasitic load on society. So don't think of David Koresh and the FLDS as cults.

Think of them as start ups.
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