The Judeo/Christian/Islamic Old Testament examples are hard to beat. With the Universe being created in 7 days, Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark, etc. The New Testament which starts with a being that created 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars impregnating a teenage Jewish girl, then putting The Star of Bethlehem above Jesus's house to guide people to it. However there are many other things that just don't make any sense. For me, one of my favorite examples is fundraising. Let's look at how that evolved:

When I was a kid, our little league team would have bake sales. We would actually create something of value (cookies, brownies, dinner rolls, etc.) then sit outside and sell the thing of value to people and give the proceeds to our little league.

There are plenty of similar things that go on today like massage therapists giving free massages at fundraising events and asking people to donate funds to charity. That all makes sense.

You take one step further, and you get things like the St. Jude Cancer run, and walks to raise funds for cancer and other diseases. The person making the donation is not getting anything of value, but the person asking for the donation is putting out considerable effort in an activity that is good for them.

What makes no sense at all are things like the Polar Plunge for Special Olympics, where people strip down to a speedo in January and jump into ice cold water in order to get people to donate to charity. What started as "I'm going to make something of value, sell it to you, and donate the proceeds to charity" has evolved to "I'm going to do something insane and bad for me, so therefore you should donate money to charity"

But (in my opinion) the pinnacle of ridiculousness was the "Ice Bucket Challenge" Someone is challenged to do something ridiculous (dump a bucket of ice water on their head) and film it. And if they do that, they DON'T have to donate anything to an ALS charity. However if they refuse to do the ridiculous thing, they feel compelled to donate funds to the ALS charity. If they are really concerned about ALS, why don't they just write a check to the ALS charity?

Anyway, that's my take on it, any better examples out there?