This is a fascinating book that ranges from Hitler and Himmler through to whooping cough.  A must read for religious and philosophical explorers.

Seen through the lens of natural selection, religions can only survive if they are fitted to their environment, in the case the human mind. The goal of the book is to provoke a paradign in the shift in the reader's thinking about religion.                                                                                                              The Scientific and Medical Network

Why are some religions, like songs and genes, more successful than others? Why do some beliefs, like jokes and species, become extinct while others adapt and flourish? James shows us how genetic evolution and cultural evolution, though operating at different rates, are one and the same: information that finds a successful niche and contains within its message the means to produce in its host the motivation to reproduce itself. Religion is a robust virus of the mind. Recent science has gone a long way toward explaining the origin of religious belief in evolutionary terms, but Craig James has cracked open the mystery of its tenacity. Religion does not exist for us, it exists for its own sake, hijacking our instincts. Like a selfish gene or a parasite, the religion virus catches a free ride in the minds of our species, infecting our history and culture. What Guns, Germs and Steel did for anthropology, this book does for faith. It puts the pieces together into a fascinating, coherent model that makes sense! ~ Dan Barker, President, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Author: Godless (Ulysses, 2008), Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children, and Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher To Atheist

This is a fascinating book, condensing the peculiar histories of religious texts and how decisions made hundreds and thousands of years ago still affect our cultural attitudes and beliefs to present a model of religion that can be used to understand nearly any institutional growth pattern. The book begins by exploring the model of memetics in general, then defines eight transitions of "lines of meme mutations," that Yahweh went through to become the monotheistic god we think of now when someone writes a sentence like 'In God We Trust' on something official-looking. Craig A. James has written an accessible book on evolution and religion that manages to explain memetics while being both funny and touchingSeriously, Craig A. James has written an accessible book on evolution and religion that manages to explain memetics while being both funny and touching. ~ Wes Unruh, author, The Art of Memetics, editor of alteratic.com (For the full review, see http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=2208)

Full of powerful, ground-breaking ideas, packaged in a deceptively simple, easy-reading style. James has created one of those rare books where, every few pages, I find myself thinking, "I need to send a copy of this to so-and-so." This is the most fun I've had reading non-fiction in a long time. ~ Phil Steele, Editor, Fragment and The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics