A bizarrely common belief is that people are all powerful and all knowing. Take people who think there is no such thing as bad luck. How would that even work in a world in which humans do not have these powers- if you can't see a can in the road, you'll trip, if you can not predict the stock market with perfect accuracy, you might get a bad investment, etc,etc. So much is outside human control- we can try to tame the forces of chance, but we can't really control them. So unexpected things will happen all the time, and of course, some of those unexpected things will be bad.

Another bizarre common belief is that people who bad things happen to are bad people. An interesting example that was presented in my Psych class was that some guy had written a letter to the editor saying that Jody Foster's Hollywood debauchery was to blame for John Hinckely Jr's shooting of President Reagan- that if she had only played pure and wholesome roles on the screen, Hinckley wouldn't have used her as a focus of psychosis. That of course, is BS on the face. How is an actress going to know whether a mentally unstable person sees a film and becomes obsessed? Everything we do could possibly have negative consequences, which is of course how people(especially those who get off on hurting others) make up infinite reasons to blame people for things they certainly could not have foretold.