Think of it this way. Imaging you're immortal, and you're going to go to a deserted island for all eternity, and you can take one book with you. Suppose you want to maximize the probability that the one book you take with you will provide you value as long as possible.
You could take a practical book about how to survive on a desert island. But, since you're gonna live forever, everything in there is stuff you could figure out on your own eventually. So this book's value is only short-term.
You could take a new age book with lots of feel-good, intuitively-pleasing platitudes. But, again, you could just invent all that by yourself. Probability of eternal-term value: 0.
A collection of stories like the ones in question at least has some chance of providing eternal-term value, precisely BECAUSE on the short-term they seem so absurd. If they were intuitively pleasing at first glance, then you could just come up with them yourself eventually. This same reasoning would apply to any similar collection of stories, but the stories in question at least have a lot of precedent / test-of-time / reputable endorsements.
You could take a practical book about how to survive on a desert island. But, since you're gonna live forever, everything in there is stuff you could figure out on your own eventually. So this book's value is only short-term.
You could take a new age book with lots of feel-good, intuitively-pleasing platitudes. But, again, you could just invent all that by yourself. Probability of eternal-term value: 0.
A collection of stories like the ones in question at least has some chance of providing eternal-term value, precisely BECAUSE on the short-term they seem so absurd. If they were intuitively pleasing at first glance, then you could just come up with them yourself eventually. This same reasoning would apply to any similar collection of stories, but the stories in question at least have a lot of precedent / test-of-time / reputable endorsements.