Confusing Causes

THERE HAVE EXISTED civilizations in which the citizenry believed, with credulous fervor, that by ceremoniously dumping a virgin into the volcano, the volcano will be appeased, and, satiated, will refrain from further eruptions of hot magma, thus sparing the city below further harm.  Among pre scientific societies, all kinds of sacrifices, often often human, often virgin, were made to all kinds of imaginary gods, to appease the forces of nature, in anthropomorphic form. Flash forward to the year two thousand and twenty, the scientific revolution has manifested and modern technology has emerged, knowledge has multiplied, human understanding of the universe swells in abundance. We find that nearly two billion people, many of them with knowledge of science and nature, are firmly convinced that a virgin was slowly tortured to death on a wooden cross two thousand years ago, and that therefore the two billion people are spared the consequences of their personal bad behavior on the condition that they worship the murdered virgin as their one and only God.Question; have we learned anything about causation in the world, or haven't we? Every human action, every mistake has consequences, direct, indirect, immediate, delayed. Its very simple, basically. Its provable, demonstrable, verifiable.. So why, in an age in which your average fourth grader can program a computer, do two billion intelligent people persist in believing that sacrificing a virgin into volcano appeases the volcano god, cools the magma, makes everything all right? Why do so many human beings refuses to accept modern, factual causation, and cling to primitive, barbaric, false beliefs? Why for that matter does any intelligent twenty first century person pretend to believe that some anthropomorphic deity exists, and speaks to people in ancient manuscripts, in books and stories? Two hundred years ago Thomas Paine and Johann Von Goethe gave the world a perfectly modern, verifiable method of developing an attitude towards religion. So we have had a better blueprint for a long time.Only a handful of intellectuals, deemed radicals, paid attention. More people pay attention to natural causation now, and fewer subscribe to primitive religions, but the number is still relatively small.And thus, in the middle of a terrible pandemic to w hundred years after Paine and Goethe, in which modern science has given us the means to understand the virus and to effectively combat it, thousands upon thousands of people still crowd into poorly ventilated rooms, yelling and breathing heavily on each other,and praying to an imaginary god for relief, even while their unmasked breath spreads the disease and death from which they pray so fervently for relief.