Every culture has its old wives’ tales that are unsupported by science. American parents tell their children not to swim after eating, even though there’s no real evidence that this is dangerous. 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 actually test the hypothesis. He used his 11-year-old daughter, because no one else would volunteer.

“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.   But seven years later, it doesn’t seem to have done much to make this persistent belief blow away.    ( 2015 NPR website)

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 either 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. (This latter claim is hotly disputed by my wife).

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 and the number of virgins doesn’t matter.  The myth persists and is the probable cause of countless useless deaths.