This seems like a promising direction. So let's say that by religion I mean a useful meme. The meme consists of a doctrine. That is, a collection of statements regarding human belief or action. A person infected with the meme lives in accordance with the doctrine. The doctrine is designed to cause a useful effect, apart from its own flourishing. The effect is caused by changes in behavior of the people infected by the meme. The effect need not be explicitly stated within the doctrine. This a broad definition of religion, as it doesn't require that the doctrine contain any statements about the supernatural. But at this point I want to keep things open. As some posts have suggested, there's a lot of argument about what does or doesn't constitute a religion.
In order to be successful, a useful meme must be sufficiently:
This list is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive. And I don't claim to be using the best terminology.
For example, some religious doctrines contain the idea that if you cease to believe in any part of the doctrine, you will suffer in Hell upon death. This idea might enhance the robustness of the religion by discouraging the development of disbelief. Others contain the idea that it's your duty, or that you're rewarded in some fashion, for converting non-believers. This idea might enhance the contagiousness of the religion by encouraging those who are already infected by the meme to work to infect others.
Using this framework, perhaps the original post might be improved a bit. Putting some of the questions asked in the original post into the new framework, we get:
What other such heuristics exist? Would a large enough collection of such heuristics aid in the analysis and design of religious movements?
Unfortunately, I can't give a good definition for this except by example. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, Atheism. I suppose that it might even be possible to ask the questions assuming that science is a religion. The focus of the questions is intended to be on the engineering and social aspects, rather than on a question like "Should Atheism be considered a religion?" I understand that the vagueness makes this a less than perfect delineation of a topic.
Done. Not pretty, but the links seem to work.
How do I do that? Is it sufficient to edit a web address into the text of the old and new threads?
You're all getting into some really interesting material here, and I think that it has significance beyond the scope of conlangs. I didn't want it to get lost, or ignored by non-conlangers, here, so I started a new thread for it, called "The value of ambiguous speech". This isn't to say that it wouldn't be great to see more discussion of the application of ambiguity to Ithkuil, but I didn't want you to miss out on the wider thread if your attention was focused here.
Update: ChristianKl pointed out to me that I should put a forward link to the new discussion here (bear with me, I'm a newbie), so I'm going to try to edit one in after the fact.
Click here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0o/the_value_of_ambiguous_speech/
Sounds like a good addition to my reading list, although I just looked at her books on Amazon and the prices on most of them are outrageous (I couldn't sell a book for $28, let alone $280). But with luck it might be possible to dig up a list of the basic primitives, with commentary, on the internet somewhere.
Perhaps a special sort of quote symbol used to highlight metaphors?
All good points, and among the strengths of conlangs in general. It still amazes me that past efforts at reforming English spelling, like President Roosevelt's, weren't accepted.
I understand the temptation. From the beginning I wanted to scrap parts of the alphabet and start over. From the pedagogical perspective, accepting the fact that children have to learn 4 versions of the same alphabet (capital and non-capital, print and cursive), makes me feel like I'm condoning torture. The only common English uses for the capitals are to set off sentence beginnings and proper nouns, both of which could be handled differently. And now that we're beyond the days of manual typesetting, the only justification for print fonts is that they're easier to read than cursive fonts. I'd love to find or create a non-capital, cursive font that's just as easy to read as print fonts, and then scrap three of the four alphabets. but even separated and with serifs, cursive fonts just never seem to be as easy on the eyes as print fonts. So I decided to stay with contemporary English conventions to enhance ease of learning for English-speaking adults.
I'm doing a little reading on both of them now. Big question: how to make them successful as social movements. I wonder if their elements can be modeled in a fashion similar to that which I did above. And if so, if there's anything that such an application can tell us about how to improve their chances for success.