The believer issue

I was in a discussion with one of my friend regarding the recent act of Asharam Bapu. 

She was frustrated, as every women would be. And she yelled, "Why do people believe in such stupid thing and people? Why don't they think for their own? Why don't they use their brain?"

This is a very common question around.I could remember few books I read by Micheal Shermer. I would like to share some of my learning.

Here is what it has to say.

We humans are believing animals. We are tightly programmed to believe than to question something. In a situation of fight or flight, our ancestor, most of the time, choose fighting.

It is clearly understandable by imagining our long-long back ancestors. Sometime 100,000 years ago. They where in and around caves and isolated. The group was not more than 15-20 people, most of them close kin. Now it was quite logical for everybody to believe everybody else in order to survive. The altruist behavior was energized by belief. Rationale was not so needed. If a young member of the group "believe" in his father and uncles, he be well managed to convince them to have share their food with him. He will gain trust and ultimately have a better chance of growing up to mate and produce offspring, which are likely to be him. On the other hand, if he questions and argues, there are chances that he may accumulate hatred and run a chance to be thrown out of the group, and having a chance to be eaten by wild animals and hence lesser survival chances.

Curiosity and rationality was not something of larger importance at that time. Hence very few people on this planet "choose to question and speak the truth". Galileo, Aristotle, Archimedes, Faraday, Einstein, Aryabhatta, Hawking, Gandhi, Martin King Luther, Kennedy, Hitchen, Steve Jobs, Arvind Kejriwal, Noam Chomsky, etc. You can count them on a 8 digit calculator.

Education system "was given" the responsibility to make people curious, truthful and less superstitious. Sadly, it is failing high time.

So to conclude, majority of the population believe in such kind of Babas, religious leaders and politicians is not a mistake of their own, rather it the way we are "programmed". But we can choose not to be fooled. We can make rational decisions. No doubt in that.