You mean anyone believing what a religious leader tells them is an ignorant savage?

So why do people believe in the bible etc?

Billions of people all over the world seem prepared to accept what religious leaders claim to be true.

I guess they are all savages?

Religion answers the questions that we have no answers for. So it's comforting for most humans to have answers to these kinds of questions. That's one reason why they believe the bible. "on est tous des sauvages"

You seem to have this idea that people pick up the Bible, read "Jesus walked on water", and go "Wow, praise God!" In actuality, what matters isn't the claims the Bible makes, but the actual words that Jesus and the prophets speak. These words are packed with timeless superhuman wisdom, sort of like ancient Greek philosophers except on steroids. A sincere Christian wrestles with God and with the scriptures.

"The seed sown on rocky ground is the one who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since he has no root, he remains for only a season. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away." (Matthew 13:20-21)

I didn't say that all religious people were like that.

I said religious people that just listen to what a religious figure says and believes it are. Which is what we were discussing happened with the Aztecs. If a christian does it it's also ignorant.

What you describe isn't ignorance. Stop trying to make me seem unreasonable by distorting my arguments.

But, assuming the account is correct, do we know that any significant amount of believed it? A lot of "big lies" are told not with the expectation that people are to believe in them literally but to distract from other issues or otherwise more subtly affect people. We get them all the time from politicians today. Why wouldn't they have the same thing in the past?

nero pretended to be an incarnation of apollo; were the romans ignorant savages?

Religiously speaking? Yes. Though I don't know that anyone's daily life back then was modified to accommodate this claim.

They didn't believe it, though, per the article.

Having peasant-level subjects believe the mystic stuff peddled by the state propaganda machine paints the civilization as "ignorant savages" to a much lesser degree than a head of state believing the mystic stuff themselves.

At the time the heads of European states believed they had a god-given right to rule etc.

Why does an American president have to swear on a bible, even nowadays?

They don’t. They could swear on the Constitution, or the Quran, or a picture their granddaughter drew for them.

It’s the oath that matters, not what your hand is on.