Reply #26: Oh the ability to project identity is a common human trait

[Az]

And identity will get projected onto anything that exhibits behavior that is not fully understood. But society takes those basic projections and formalizes them and that is where specific gods, spirits, and entities come from. They are a socially derived based on the exchange of ideas concerning such projections. That is until some engineering type comes along and figures out that fire is just the oxidation of combusting matter and not actually a being of mystical import. Once people have a full enough understanding of something and determine that there is no actually an identity behind the behavior the mind overlays that information and the tendency to think of it as an entity is diminished or nullified.