Why build an Ark?

[Anomalocaris]

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.