...and why they are now fading out.
I watched a BBC documentary called Inside the Medieval Mind the other day and it all clicked for me. Atheists wonder how it's possible that so many people accept Christianity as true, and now I have an answer. Let me explain.
What the presenter, Robert Bartlett, FRHistS, FBA, FRSE, FSA, English historian and medievalist, pointed out is that people used to believe any damn thing they were told. He didn't put it so crassly, of course, but there you have the essence of his point.
Take as an example the belief in whole societies of dog heads. People were told of sightings of human men with the heads of dogs that lived in a distant land, and they believed these accounts with no evidence and no skepticism. This belief was so entrenched that the phenomenon was given a name (Cynocephaly), and the church leaders actually debated whether or not these creatures possessed human souls.
It's not that people in ancient times were stupid. It's that they were understandably credulous. After all, the natural world was largely unknown; the scientific method and the idea of skeptical inquiry were nonexistent. So one deranged or mischievous person starts with a tale of dog heads, and the rumor spreads until it's something everyone knows.
This phenomenon occurs today, but it tends to get started and then sputter, remaining among the kook fringe (take alien abduction, Bigfoot, etc. as examples).
So my theory is that stories about Yahweh and then Jesus circulated and were believed, then written down, with no evidence and little skepticism until the belief systems came to be accepted by so many people that they came to possess credibility by sheer force of numbers in our modern day, supposedly rational culture.
Your thoughts?
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