Why ‘I Hate Religion, But I Love Jesus’ Is So Popular

Via Scoop.it – Story and Narrative

Despite its 21st century packaging, Bethke’s performance shares in a long tradition of oral storytelling — one that shaped itself over thousands of years to the particular proclivities of the human brain.   Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture, originating long before the advent of written language. In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear and memorable to the mind or else they would simply disappear. After all, most messages we hear are forgotten, or if they’re passed on, they’re changed beyond recognition — as psychologists’ investigations of how rumors evolve have shown. In his classic book Memory in Oral Traditions, cognitive scientist David Rubin notes, “Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. If a tradition is to survive, it must be stored in one person’s memory and be passed on to another person who is also capable of storing and retelling it. All this must occur over many generations… Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material.” Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/08/why-i-hate-religion-but-love-jesus-is-so-popular/#ixzz1lojvrMSI
Via ideas.time.com