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

Mark Isaak <specimenNOSPAM@curioustaxon.omy.net> writes:

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.

Not quite so easily, in the case of gnosticism it was supressed and
persecuted to extinction, by, wait for it, the orthodox church!

"The Inquisition was established in 1233 to uproot the remaining
Cathars.[86] Operating in the south at Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne and
other towns during the whole of the 13th century, and a great part of
the 14th, it succeeded in crushing Catharism as a popular movement,
driving its remaining adherents underground.[86] Cathars who refused to
recant or relapsed were hanged, or burnt at the stake.[5]

"On Friday 13 May 1239, in Champagne, 183 men and women convicted of
Catharism were burned at the stake on the orders of the Dominican
inquisitor and former Cathar Perfect Robert le Bougre [fr].[87] Mount
Guimar, in northeastern France, had already been denounced as a place of
heresy in a letter of the Bishop of Liège to Pope Lucius II in
1144.[88][full citation needed][89] "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism

>
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.