In South Korea, many older people fear that if you sleep with an electric fan in the room, you may never wake up. The South Korean news media and scientists keep trying to debunk this notion, but it won’t go away. In 2008, Chun Rim, a professor at the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, decided to test the hypothesis. He says it was hard to find anyone to take part in this so-called dangerous experiment. So he used his 11-year-old daughter.
“Every five minutes I checked her body temperature, blood pressure, and also the temperature of her hand,” he says. She survived the night. Her vitals barely changed. And now, the whole family sleeps with fans blowing on them. The study got some attention when it came out. But seven years later, it doesn’t seem to have done much to make this persistent belief blow away. Adapted from the NPR website in 2015).
This illustrates the comfort that human beings derive from weird beliefs of all sorts. You can do surveys, studies, scientific analyses and so on, but a fixed belief dies hard. I personally do not believe that walking under a ladder with a man with a pot of paint in his hand above me brings bad luck or guarantees that I get splattered with paint. But I very deliberately walk beneath the ladder to prove to myself that I am grown up and rational.
Most of these beliefs are harmless, but some are not. The idea that if you kill yourself and others for the love of Allah you are rewarded in heaven with 72 young virgins is one of the silliest beliefs, even if it is one of the most stellar marketing claims ever for a religion (and for anything else I can think of, for that matter). The actual translation seems to be controversial Some translate it as “companions of the same age”. The number of virgins is not mentioned in the texts, and in any case many would settle for fewer than 72 anyway. But the translation doesn’t matter. The myth persists and is the probable cause of countless futile deaths. Regrettably, the gullible young men who do this often take many others with them. Justify it – if you can!