The issue of Blasphemy in Islam

[The Grand Nudger]

First you attempt to rationalize an irrational belief, namely that beliefs are rational because they are ancient.

Why do human beings think this way?  This perspective was common in ancient Rome, that is, if something is old, it must be good.

Probably because our primary method of transmitting wisdom is oral, and intimate.  Old ideas come to us by way of an unbroken chain of narration - seeming to confer them with the value that only time (nd time-testing) bring..and, in addition, those beliefs cover themselves with our feelings and attachments to the chain of narrators themselves.  Be it a line of "great men" "holy prophets" or just our own sainted parents and grandparents, all the way back, to the beginning of us. Even in our god stories, the form seems to be that some god does some great and wonderful thing for the character, and then makes an ask or gives us a command. The connection between the two events is intentional and useful - triggers reciprocity and binds that god to the same chain of family and narration which we ourselves identify with and as.

The first gods (in the sense we now know them) were almost certainly dead ancestors. Red ochre burials signal the beginning of such beliefs and then very quickly burial reification or deification followed. They didn't write, so we don't know, but it would be entirely implausible to believe that a community which prepared it's dead in such a way didn't have people who espoused the wisdom of uncle ogg long after his demise.