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Originally posted by Heavy Arms
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I'll add a point I make sometimes: non-belief is a vast minority in humans in our real world.
Even if you try to tease apart religion and "folk" beliefs, most people believe in some sort of paranormal creature outside of their religion's teachings (ghosts are, by far, the most commonly believed in Christian dominated societies despite Christianity not actually having any dogma around ghosts). While such anthropological studies are fraught with difficulties in how to ensure proper questioning and separation of different sorts of beliefs, there's still a pretty consistent finding that somewhere between 60% to 75% of humans in any given population believe in at least one paranormal phenomenon. Again, discounting organized religious beliefs such as a creator deity or angels.
The vast majority of humans are also members of an organized religion of some stripe, and thus belong to organizations where active belief in unproven phenomena is the norm.
We would not have the world we have no without belief in a lot of things that are no longer publicly acceptable things to say you believe in. Folk beliefs to full religious zealotry has been shaping real world human history for longer than we recognize "history" as being a thing (yay the concept of "prehistory" humans!).
People in the real world, by a vast majority, are already believers in the existence of the supernatural/paranormal/whatever you want to call the specific belief. It's a natural part of how we function as a species, because even when you try to take supernatural things out, you still have conspiracy theories, UFOs, and other such thinking to take its place in our heads. Our brains are pattern recognition machines, and once we see a pattern, regardless of if we come to believe it's real or not, or if we can prove its validity or not, our brains have extreme trouble letting those patterns go completely. This as influenced politics and war, architecture and art, philosophy and social norms, and on and on.
What the CofD asks as a shift in setting to a world very close to our own is that instead of the vast majority of humans believing in the folk stories that we've been telling in one form or another for thousands of years, the vast majority of humans have seen the "reality" behind those stories and retreated to the stories for comfort against the existential dread of the truth.
In our world, humans want to believe and hope their believes are the ones to be affirmed by discovering the truth. In the Darkness, humans believe because that's safer than knowing the truth.
Even if you try to tease apart religion and "folk" beliefs, most people believe in some sort of paranormal creature outside of their religion's teachings (ghosts are, by far, the most commonly believed in Christian dominated societies despite Christianity not actually having any dogma around ghosts). While such anthropological studies are fraught with difficulties in how to ensure proper questioning and separation of different sorts of beliefs, there's still a pretty consistent finding that somewhere between 60% to 75% of humans in any given population believe in at least one paranormal phenomenon. Again, discounting organized religious beliefs such as a creator deity or angels.
The vast majority of humans are also members of an organized religion of some stripe, and thus belong to organizations where active belief in unproven phenomena is the norm.
We would not have the world we have no without belief in a lot of things that are no longer publicly acceptable things to say you believe in. Folk beliefs to full religious zealotry has been shaping real world human history for longer than we recognize "history" as being a thing (yay the concept of "prehistory" humans!).
People in the real world, by a vast majority, are already believers in the existence of the supernatural/paranormal/whatever you want to call the specific belief. It's a natural part of how we function as a species, because even when you try to take supernatural things out, you still have conspiracy theories, UFOs, and other such thinking to take its place in our heads. Our brains are pattern recognition machines, and once we see a pattern, regardless of if we come to believe it's real or not, or if we can prove its validity or not, our brains have extreme trouble letting those patterns go completely. This as influenced politics and war, architecture and art, philosophy and social norms, and on and on.
What the CofD asks as a shift in setting to a world very close to our own is that instead of the vast majority of humans believing in the folk stories that we've been telling in one form or another for thousands of years, the vast majority of humans have seen the "reality" behind those stories and retreated to the stories for comfort against the existential dread of the truth.
In our world, humans want to believe and hope their believes are the ones to be affirmed by discovering the truth. In the Darkness, humans believe because that's safer than knowing the truth.
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