Random thought #1:
In primitive times humans got their ideas from observing cause and effect.
If somebody got injured with great loss of blood they would die. Even the dullest thinker would associate blood with life itself.
Random thought #2
When you watch somebody at their deathbed event the cessation of breathing is the signal of death itself.
A primitive observer would connect the exhalation (death-rattle) with the going-out-of-life.
We get the word reSPIRation (breathing) and the word SPIRit connected to the thought of an intangible soul.
In other words, something (spirit, soul, breath) leaving the body and going off and away at the point of death ORIGINATED belief in the soul.
A BIG DEAL is attached to a simple thing in and of itself no big deal.
Random thought #3
A lot of bogus ideas come from mixing things together which do not belong together. The fallacy of post hoc, ergo, propter hoc occurs. (Because something happened before an event therefore it must have caused the event) leads to spurious conclusions. Have you ever known somebody with a so-called "lucky" shirt they wear bowling because the last time they wore it their league won the tournament?
Random thought #4
Whenever people face something they can't explain, a strange thing happens to their thinking process. Without proper training and discipline of thought, it is very easy to attach a "likely" cause. Mind you, they are acting out of ignorance while AT THE SAME TIME using ignorance as though it were a tool for solving problems! Why is it so painful to put NOT KNOWING on hold until more data, facts and proofs are available rather than rushing to fill the void with a totally nonsense cause? Isn't it likely we are going to fall in love with our bogus answer since we are using our own standards for selecting it in the first place?
Random thought #5
Once a wrong idea (which sounds like a really good idea) gets passed around and a group of people accept it and repeat it--changing people's minds about it is one of the hardest things in the world to accomplish!
The "meme" word was first introduced by evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, in 1976. "Meme" comes from the Greek word "mimema" (meaning "something imitated", American Heritage Dictionary). Dawkins described memes as a being a form of cultural propogation, a way for people to transmit social memories and cultural ideas to each other. Not unlike the way that DNA and life will spread from location to location, a meme idea will also travel from mind to mind.
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Random thought #6 (about all the above random thoughts. . .)
I ask myself: WHAT IS THE STARTING POINT? Before an idea gets passed around and accepted, what was the earliest instance of it?
Most often, that first instance might have seemed to be a no-brainer.
What if it were actually a NO-brainer?
No brain operating skeptically would-jump to a conclusion without testing and research.
And yet--so much of what we accept as totally true and believable is purified garbage.
Why believe in a spirit or soul as a mystical intangible other than the air we breathe?
Is it because almost every religion back into primitive times has passed that idea forward without proof as though a TRUE fact?
Why believe blood is the mystical soul or animated life in any real sense?
Why build a doctrine of prohibition around such an untestable premise?
Isn't it because we've already accepted yet another untestable premise: HOLY, GOD, SCRIPTURE. . . ?
The more untestable things you've ALREADY ACCEPTED the easier it is to compound ignorance and wrong guesses as FACT!
If somebody volunteered to donate blood (without dying in the process) so that another person could use it---no actual death is involved.
That would be a practical way of looking at it.
But, once you attach a religious or mystical (unprovable) connotation---well, it is beyond reasoning or good sense!
Aren't most of our human problems simply due to unclear conclusions derrived from hasty guesses and urban myths, untested beliefs and faulty
cause and effect hypothesis?
