Why do many people believe in magic and vodoo and stuff when clearly there is no sign of it , or is there 🤔 Nah there isn't it would have been

In a small lake in Madang, Papua New Guinea, there lived an
old, and rather large, saltwater crocodile. One day I was with
local colleagues heading out to a community. As we drove past
this lake I spotted a sign I hadn’t noticed before: ‘Beware of
crocodile’. It made me laugh.

‘You see that sign there? They only have a sign on this side
of the lake. So if a tourist comes from the other side and goes
swimming, they will get eaten.’

My colleagues laughed. Then they added, ‘Yes, but the
crocodile won’t eat you. Crocodiles aren’t really dangerous.’

That didn’t make any sense.

‘Umm … Yes. Crocodiles are dangerous.’ This didn’t
provoke any response from the others in the vehicle. ‘We
have the same crocs in Australia. People get killed all the time.
Mostly German tourists …’

‘Crocodiles will only attack you if you’ve been cursed.’
Well, that was interesting. If it was true, this is precisely
what you need to know before you decide whether or not to
swim.

‘OK, so then how do you know if you’ve been cursed?’

One of my colleagues responded as if the answer was
obvious and uninteresting. ‘You get eaten by the crocodile.’
Of course. How could I have missed it? So I pointed out
that if you don’t know whether you’ve been cursed until a
crocodile eats you, then you might as well consider crocodiles
dangerous. They laughed.

I thought about the logic.
Assumption: You only get eaten by a crocodile if you are cursed.
Observation: The German tourist was eaten by a crocodile.
Conclusion: Therefore the German tourist must have
been cursed.

It’s logical, but it begs the question. So as we drove on I
threw it back to them. ‘You know, your conclusion that crocodile attacks are caused by curses is based on your assumption that crocodile
attacks are caused by curses.’

They understood what I was saying, and laughed, but their
position remained unchanged. Because their world view works.
The problem is that for some people in PNG the next logical
steps are: Conclusion 2: Therefore someone from the other
tribe must have cursed him; ergo, Conclusion 3: We need to
kill someone from their tribe for payback.

We continued to drive for hours through the dense
rainforest of Papua, vehicle sliding through the mud, with
roads and bridges sometimes completely washed away. I was
overwhelmed by the raw power of nature, by places that didn’t
‘wear man’s smudge and share man’s smell.’ I wasn’t feeling as
though my world view was superior because we don’t believe in
curses. The people here had lived in harmony with crocodiles
and their environment. My culture, without blinking, was
bulldozing everything flat to cover the earth in asphalt and
concrete, leaving crocodiles, other creatures and remnants of
forests in little enclosures for posterity. And our world view
continues to bulldoze and pour concrete as if it would cover
the entire world. For the natural world, our culture has been
the curse.