8 Totally Batsh*t Things People Actually Believe
1. Religion
"Whoa," you say, "the Flat Earthers are deffo nuts, but that's a bit far".
Let's be very clear and state that I am not calling religious people nutters. But you have to admit that the dogma and beliefs that go along with organised religion are, actually, just as nuts as any of the other ideas in this article. The fact that the idea of a talking snake tempting a woman to eat an apple (and that's why childbirth hurts) seems any less ridiculous to us than somebody suggesting the sun goes around the earth, is a triumph of familiarity.
The idea of god and religion actually started out life as a science, a method of enquiry that attempted to explain the unexplainable. Early man observed that "man creates" and made the step of logic that something might have "created man" and it all sort of snowballed from there really. Beyond that, the ceremony, rituals, beliefs, customs and quirks are all, objectively, pretty bizarre.
Furthermore, as we need god less and less to explain the mysteries of the universe, these rituals and customs become more and more prominent. Occam's razor is cutting god away and leaving the ritual in his place.
Imagine sitting an alien down and explaining that we have an invisible being in the sky that wants you to cut off the tip of your son's penis, or cover your women, or load two of every animal onto a boat. That you literally drink blood and eat flesh every Sunday, so that you won't have to spend the rest of eternity in a fiery pit with pokers up your backside because a lady ate some magic fruit one time. Flat Earthers don't seem so weird now, do they?
You can see how we got here though. Humans are programmed to believe what their peers tell them. It's like when the warning hoot of a lookout monkey send the rest of the troop scattering, they don't hang around to find out if the lookout was telling the truth, they just run with the crowd because it's safer. Religion is basically as much a part of your evolution as your opposable thumbs.
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