Why Superstition Is Irritating

On Friday 13th, Charlie Albuery asks why, even in the twenty-first century, people remain so prone to superstition.

 

Full disclosure before we begin: I originally intended to approach this article as I do most, tear something down with words, ruthlessly lampoon something hoping to mildly amuse the majority of you, offending a small minority in the process. However, if I took that approach to superstition, what would there be to say? My whole article could be boiled down to: ‘Don’t do silly things because of bizarre arbitrary guidelines you’ve set yourself, based upon little to no reason.’

But that’s boring – and if there’s one thing I’m trying not to be for the next few hundred words its boring. So stick with me, here we go.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal once issued this famous quotation regarding the existence of God: ‘Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.’ In essence, one might as well believe because in that way you lose nothing, but by not believing (in the small chance the belief in question is real) the consequences may be great.

Now, I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m relatively happy with my mother’s back unbroken and the seven years of moderate luck stretching before me aren’t a particularly grim concept, so, following Blaise Pascal’s sound logic, I should become superstitious. So, largely (although not entirely) due to his incredibly cool name, we’ll roll with Blaise for a moment, shall we? Let’s consider what life would be like were I, and all of you by extension of course (as I am one hell of a trendsetter), to immediately begin to follow a life-system based upon a hastily arranged amalgam of the world’s most popular superstitions. Actually, no, that will never work; some are simply too ridiculous for us to follow. Allow me a moment to discount some of my biggest superstition-based bugbears.

First up –I am a hay-fever sufferer (and not a quiet one) and from around mid-June through to late August the phrase I hear most often is ‘God Bless You’. Whatever belief system you happen to follow, this is irritating. If you say ‘God Bless You’ and don’t believe in God then your words are empty and you are, at that point, essentially, wasting oxygen. If, however, you do believe in God and say ‘God Bless You’, then (a) you’re invoking your Lord’s name in vain and (b) what does that say about the Big Man Upstairs’ priorities? There are global poverty, starvation and disease to deal with! Yet you’re trying to waste his time on me because I have the sniffles? Just . . . just . . . don’t! Especially because I am immediately obliged to thank you for your impromptu blessing, to which the most common reply is ‘No worries’ or ‘It’s all-right’; at this point we’ve used THREE SENTENCES to discuss a sneeze, a function we all understand and should treat with total indifference. From now on, I want to sneeze and hear either ‘Oh, he sneezed, no comment’ or total, blissful, silence.

Secondly – Rabbit’s feet . . . come on, seriously? Even assuming, for a moment, that the left hind foot of a rabbit does give good luck to its wearer, that still doesn’t make it a reasonable thing to do! Wearing the skins of 101 dalmations would have made Cruella DeVille both warm and fashionable and yet everybody hated her for wearing a piece of an animal to further her own cause.

Thirdly (and finally) – When we see stars in space, due to their distance from us and the speed of light, we are seeing those stars thousands of years in the past, and that ‘shooting star’, that symbol of hope and dreams? That’s what happens when a star dies. When you wish upon a star, that star is dead, and so are your dreams.

Oh, I appear to have ended up more focusing on the negatives here. I was trying so hard to be positive about superstitions, but things like horoscopes seem so illogical to me. Well that’s us Virgos, I guess, always being over-critical.

This article was originally published in the magazine version of Portsmouth Point ('Belief' issue) in December, 2013.