Ireland has just created legislation which will make it illegal to blaspheme.
“Blasphemous matter” is defined as matter “that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion”
Given that parts of the Koran directly accuse Christians of blasphemy, that all the Abrahamic religions are guilty of blasphemy to each other, and that almost all religions are blasphemous to someone, the blasphemy law is clearly farcical. The Bible and the Koran are now potentially illegal in Ireland, beacuase of a law designed to protect their followers.
Dawkins claimed the law was a return to the Middle Ages, however in that period it would have made some sense since blasphemy would have only applied to the one religion, yielding less self-contradiction.
In short, Irelands blasphemy law is designed to protect only opinions which are held without reason against unreasonable opinion. Tenets held because of reason rather than faith are not protected, because they are not religion.
Ireland now has a law that says that:
(i) if enough people say black is white and are
(ii) offended by the opposite,
(iii) providing its a belief based on superstition not evidence,
(iv) it is illegal to tell them otherwise.

More here

Memetics evangelist, Susan Blackmore has a piece in New Scientist which suggests that replicated information in computers is distinct from memes, and therefore something new altogether.
“Evolution’s third replicator: Genes, meme, and now what?”
Biologist Larry Moran calls this pseudoscience.
Forget about the fact that I was talking about something similar to Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’ in the post below (it was under the tag ‘half baked ideas’, a non-scientific ramble), one of the problems with the idea of memes is that it imagines that memes are somehow different from genes. This opens up the inevitable possibility of a zoo of gene-like things as Blackmore suggests and Moran takes issue with.
At an abstract level, genes contain information, so do memes and Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’. One of the defining features of information is that it can be stored in different languages or media.
A better way to look at memes might be that genes are a particular flavor of meme instead of the current notion that memes are a by product of intelligent gene-based organisms