That's probably an exercise in free misanthropy instead of a factual account of why the narratives in magic book have persisted and appealed. By the time the intelligentsia gets down to codifying an official version of this story, the yokels had been telling it for as long as the official version has since been told. They weren't overawed, they were simply not overconcerned with irrelevant and mutable detail.

No more so than people are today.

(March 21, 2023 at 12:16 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: god told noah to build a boat because people had already told the tale centuries before the eternal un-caused cause had first been caused

True enough.

Boru

(March 21, 2023 at 12:12 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The functional ambiguity of the details is intentional.  It's what makes the story transportable.

The Old Testament certainly didn’t frequently opt for calculated ambiguity, nor lack boldness in naming the who, when and where, when describing events that would help make its main yokel audience feel they are privileged to be near the centers of the goings on that marks the progress of the world.

Didn’t lack boldness that is, when there appear to have been little likelihood of immediate contradiction and pushback from those in the same social circle but more knowledgeable.

(March 21, 2023 at 12:33 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: That's probably an exercise in free misanthropy instead of a factual account of why the narratives in magic book have persisted and appealed.  By the time the intelligentsia gets down to codifying an official version of this story, the yokels had been telling it for as long as the official version has since been told.  They weren't overawed, they were simply not overconcerned with irrelevant and mutable detail.

No more so than people are today.

There is nothing misanthropic in saying cults work, they mainly purposely work for their own aggrandizement, and by largely random chance some cults would work so well that they eventually gain the position to redefine what cult is to help further its own aggrandizement.

I rather see it as a backhanded compliment to apparently largely innate human skill in sophisticated social perception and manipulation, and goal formulation when hucksters can balance multiple competing objectives and weigh their relative importance in formulating their con.

My sunny optimism about human nature is dimmed more by individual act of cruelty spontaneously made by children towards eachother than the evolved cruelty of religion that took millions thousands of years to bring to the present state. 

But same social opportunism skills afford humanity as much potential for collective achievement as it does in creating scope for mutural abnubilation and promotion of iniquity under the guise of divine will.

You might have absolutely all of this backwards.

(March 21, 2023 at 1:35 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: You might have absolutely all of this backwards.

i don’t think so.   while chance play a grossly underestimated role in things like religion, malice and intent also do.   the two underestimations are not mutually exclusive.   They are underestimated because they are customarily and purposeful vociferously denied for obviously reasons.

But malice and intent would be denied more vociferously because of stronger association with culpability.

Malice and intent are cross purpose to general misanthropy. We're either adept multigenerational schemers, or over-awed yokels..but at some point a person does have to pick a lane. The seemingly "yokelish" appraisal of the world that would need to be maintained if some interpretations of the magic flood in magic book were true were not engineered outcomes of a post literary time traveling culture and...clearly...not seen to be important enough for clarification from their creation to current day.

I have long maintained an open invitation on these forums to simulate the hydrology of any given region on an actual map in consideration of a literal flood (it's not hard to do, there are tools..). Nobody ever bites, and nobody needs to bite, because the mysteries of wherever water may have touched are unimportant to the thrust of the narrative and have simply never been important to the retelling of the story. Yokelish or otherwise. That's why people who knew better could still believe in the general truth of the tale, from that day to this one.

If I'm being blunt, what I always want to coach a deluge believer to is why they think some narrative detail of the story has to be true, and true as told - whatever that means for any of them. Because it's that thing that's important. That thing that informs their ideology. That thing, real or simply perceived. For you, apparently, that thing is conspiracy? You don't believe in a deluge, but you believe in the conspiracy, and the efficacy of a conspiracy, of the deluge. Why? Do you think people living on the golan heights really imagined an inland sea swallowing them? This area has a history of human occupation going all the way back to the neolithic, and never in that time had the main dilemma been "too much water"....and it's a relatively wet area.....

multi-generational scheme is easy to achieve when the interests of multiple generations of schemers align so that each generation will readily arrive at the same scheme and understand how to build on past schemes by themselves.

vast majority of people are yokels, especially in the pre-literary age or age when socially enforced conformance is strong.   one need not be stupid to be a yokel, one only needs to be intellectually disinterested enough to not find it worthwhile to buck the trend or resist pressure to be an yokel.

I'm guessing we owe it all to some Einstein of grift in the distant past.

nah, probably lots of people above 85th percentile in grift talent contributed.

I think it should not be surprising that we find public service, intellectual honesty and integrity, and ultruism praise worthy distinguishing characteristics, because pervasive structural incentive across some if not all societies, probably arising from interaction with deep seated human social and cognative machinery, are for people to not behave like that.   it is simply a matter of some people react more strongly or effectively to extent incentives than others.