Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Just the facts, m'am

Allergy to chaos.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

The simplest explanation is that the human mind evolved to generate patterns from seemingly unrelated observations. That's how it works. This is so effective, that many optical illusions are based on it, showing how four or five spots can be a face, a few lines can be an animal, or a word with many letters missing can be immediately recognizable.

http://members.aol.com/Cwong65803/Optical/Illusion/Perspective/dog.jpg


See the dog?

The human mind rejects chaos, and if no order is available in the environment, it will try to impose it. I suspect religion in general is based on this primal urge. Humans find immense comfort in believing that something is Controlling Things at some level, especially if they feel they can either predict what it's going to do, or influence it in some way.

Conspiracy theories fall under this category. Sadly, people would rather believe that evil is in charge than believe that nobody is.

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