Lorem Ipsum

Kendra tells me that LDS (the Mormon church) is growing fast; 40%+ (per year? I forget). Why do people convert, to any religion? I ask, not expecting an answer. And she tells me, because she's been studying exactly this process as part of her research for her dissertation on early Christianity. Among other things, people convert to gain a community. The Mormons apparently have this down to a science. If a new family moves in next door, you go through a 13-step process with them, introducing yourself and becoming friends and finding out what problems they have; for example, if they have unruly kids, you can talk with them about family stuff. It's not until step 8 of the process that you even mention religion.

(I should note that I may well have details of the above, and the below, wrong; I wasn't taking notes.)

Another interesting bit from that conversation: there's little archaelogical record to help indicate how many congregations of early Christians there were in a given area, because they met in people's homes, not in churches.

And another: How did Christianity end up winning? I ask. Was it all Constantine's fault?, and it turns out that nobody's entirely sure, but it was probably well underway before Constantine. One theory is that exponential growth really works. If you grow by 40% per decade, then you stay small for a long time but then you get big really fast. Over the course of 50 years, Christianity went from negligible size to about 10% of the Roman empire. And I was thinking: what would it be like to be a non-convert during that time, to watch this cult appear out of nowhere and take over one in ten people in your known world, during the course of a single lifetime? Massive paradigm shifts. Is that comparable to the exponential growth in technology that the Vingean singularists are always talking about? We're (or at least I'm) used to thinking of rapid technological and social change as a modern phenomenon (look at airplanes: from barnstorming to the Concorde and the WTC in a single lifetime), but there were big upheavals in the old times too.

Later, I pick up a book (TechGnosis)that my father gave me a while back and find some interesting notes about writing systems and abstract thought. I suspect that the data's been massaged to fit the thesis here, though, so I won't go into much detail; for example, the author claims that Plato was among the first generations of boys to be systematically taught the alphabet, and that this may've had a major influence on the idea of Platonic ideals; when Susan arrives, I ask her about this, and she says she thinks there are several misrepresentations in that idea, not least of which being that ideograms are a bigger leap in symbolic thinking than the shift to alphabetic systems per se. And "among the first generations" could mean it had been going on for a hundred and fifty years.

The book also suggests, quoting some philosopher or other, that Judaism's big step forward was the alphabetic system; more specifically, that monotheist belief in an abstract God required the abstraction level of an alphabetic writing system. (The author has clearly read Snow Crash; he says something about the alphabet spreading like a virus.) It's no coincidence, he claims, that the Jews abolished the worship of representational icons and replaced that with the two tablets, a set of written words. All sorts of cool ideas mixed in there (not made explicit in the book) about Logos, the Word incarnated, "in the beginning was the Word" (I hear logos can be thought of as meaning "organizing principle") and the idea of golems being animated by slips of paper with words on them; cf "Seventy-Two Letters," which is where this part of the conversation got started, Susan mentioning talking with a professor about that story.

A sense that it all ties together; words, community, language, abstract thought, binding principles. It's not all coming clear, but a nice mix.

Anyway, I'm running late, I gotta go. But it was a very good day.