Well, I am totally bored with talking about myself again, so let’s get into some philosophy.

Superstition and religion have a long and fruitful association. Rather hilariously, one of the results of the Enlightenment was that religious institution like the Catholic Church began promulgating the idea that “primitive” people had superstition, and “civilized” people had religion.

Thus, the same people who seriously expect you to believe that only they can communicate to an all powerful sky god and save you from terrible things that will happen after you die could, seemingly without irony, claim to be saving people from “primitive superstition” in the name of damn Reason herself.

And this has largely been a successful meme. Pretending you are eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a guy who died 2000 years ago is considered religion, but astrology and crystal therapy are considered to be mere crackpot superstitions.

The message is clear : religion is superior to mere superstition.

But it is my contention is that this is precisely backwards, and it is superstition which is far more powerful and pervasive than mere religion.

In fact, religion can succeed only inasmuch as it is successful in installing superstition in its adherents, and if a major religion were truly successful in eliminating superstition, all its professional practitioners would find themselves out of a job.

That is why it is so vital for any successful religion to get their hands on the children when they are good and young, so they can instill their superstitions into their future adherents when they are far too young to process the information rationally and when, in effect, the whole world seems mysterious and superstition is their best defense.

Think about it : a small child might not grasp that they need to look both ways before crossing the street because they might get hit by a car, but if they parent successfully gets the simplified message “this is dangerous”, then the child will be safe.

This is how superstition operates. It allows us to develop aversions to things without us having to truly understand the dangers involved, and to form long term associations between situations and outcomes that help us avoid dangers we have been exposed to in the past.

That is, when this mechanism works correctly. When it malfunctions, we end up with phobias, post traumatic stress disorder, and in the worse case scenario, illnesses like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

A person with OCD, in fact, is a person at the mercy of the superstition drive gone berserk, causing the victim to be plagued by multiple persistent and extremely strong superstitions that they absolutely must obey, otherwise the superstitions will fill them with an incredible feeling of dread that it is hard to imagine if you have not been there yourself.

Back to religion now. The real message of any religion, the message that our deep animal drive that lies somewhere between simple association and actual reason can understand, is “you are in great dangers that are absolutely beyond your control except if you perform these specific rituals.”

And the rituals, of course, involve the intervention of the professional practitioners, the “priest class”, who extract various forms of tribute in order to protect you from those dangers that you would not even know existed if it was not for them.

Again, the basic nature of childhood helps them in their goal. Children are, quite literally, at the mercy of forces they cannot understand or control from the adult world. This is why children develop their own superstitions quite spontaneously, like being afraid of the monster under the bed or jumping over the cracks on the sidewalk because “step on a crack, break your mother’s back”.

Transforming unnamed fear and dread into a specific superstition allows the human mind to exert a measure of control over the random and arbitrary and unknown forces of the universe. Keep your feet from dangling off the bed, and the monster can’t get you. Skip over the cracks and your mother’s back is safe. Go to a specific building on a certain day of the week and participate in a group ritual, and you will be OK for another week, if you are good.

And often, even after the religion has gone, the superstitions remain because they still perform a function even when the largely superfluous dogma supporting it has been discarded.

Many an ex-Catholic who has not seen the inside of a church for decades will nevertheless cross themselves if they are narrowly missed by an out of control bus.

And there are all kinds of secular superstitions as well. There are the obvious ones that everyone knows about, like about what is “bad luck” (smashing a mirror, walking under a ladder) or what is “good luck” (finding a penny, or a four leaf clover).

But there are also the subtle superstitions that everybody develops that tend to fly under the radar because they operate at a very deep and subrational level of the consciousness and we are so used to them that it never occurs to us to question them rationally.

And they can have a deep and profound effect, especially if the superstition is broadly defined and hence runs deep into the marrow of existence.

For example, a person might have a superstitious belief, lodged deep in their brain, that if they are ever truly happy, they will let their guard down, and the moment they let their guard down, something terrible will happen, and so being happy is not “safe”.

Thus, this person subconsciously sabotages their own happiness because the superstition overwhelms them at convinces themselves that by avoiding happiness, they are actually making themselves “safe”.

Rationally, this is insane. What can be worse than being unhappy?

But that is the power of superstition. These associations we form can be far more powerful than our rational and conscious minds, and can even be the real force behind all of a person’s decisions, with reason left trailing behind to make up rationalizations.

And until we understand superstition as the pervasive and powerful phenomenon it is, and are humble and honest enough to recognize it in ourselves, reason will never truly stand a chance.