Re: Belief - I'd like to share this item with you.

On 3/12/24 4:56 AM, Richmond wrote:

[...]

What I said earlier was:
 

What interests me is: what is it in the human psyche which made people
come up with these theories, and gives them the energy to keep
persuing them even in the face of adversity. Also the idea of another
world, which is more real than this one,

 I am not buying the idea that it is just stupidity. Afterall when
someone posits a theory they don't know if it is true, so where does it
come from? Partly it fits with what they know, and partly it comes from
who they are, their own psychology. When people looked up at the stars
and saw a hunter, or a bear, or a plough, it wasn't because they were
stupid. It tells us about them, not about the stars.

There is a book by Elizabeth and Paul Barber titled _When they Severed Earth from Sky_ which deals with your question, although it focuses more on how myths evolve than how they originate. I don't remember much of it, but one of the processes they propose is simple exaggeration. Also, keep in mind that people remember stories far better than non-narrative arrangements of facts.
The energy to keep pursuing the mythic stories is more easily explained: Those stories have been collected into religion and marked sacred, and thereby they gain a superpowerful administrative and social organization to defend them. Plus, the stories would not have got as far as they did without being really good stories to begin with.
There have been lots of different speculations on origins of myths. It is a field which which is fun to speculate in. Most proposals have, once the initial interest has dropped of, been seen as baseless.
--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell