What is superstition?

India
July 4, 2007 1:24am CST
When you try to define the word superstition, don't you find that it is quite difficult to do so. Suppose ,for example, you said it was a belief in something that wasn't really so. Well there are many things all of us believe in that can't be proved. Besides,at certain times in man's history,everyone believed in certain things that we now regard as superstititions . And the people who believed in them at that time weren't superstitious at all. For example, they believed that the shadow or reflections of a person was a part of soul.So they considered that you would harm the soul,if you broke anything on which this shadow or reflection appeared . Therefore they considered it harmful unlucky to break mirror. But remember at that time this was a belief held by most people. Today if someone considers it unlucky to break a mirror he is superstitious.Today we no longer believe that a shadow or reflection is a part of the soul. So a superstition is actually a belief or practice that people cling to after new knowledge or facts have appeared to disprove them . That's why it is impossible to say when superstition began. In ancient times man tried to explain events in the world as best as he could with the knowledge at hand. He did not know much about the sun, stars,moon,comets and so on, So he made up explanations about them and followed certain practice to protect himself from their influence.That is why astrology was an accepted belief at one time.But with the development of science,the heavenly bodies comes to be known and understood, the old beliefs should have died out. When they didn't and when people still believed that ,for example , that seeing an shotting star brought good luck,these beliefs became superstitions What does the word superstition mean to you? what do u think? Are u superstitious? If yes than about what?
1 response
@Tantrums (945)
• Philippines
24 Sep 09
I suspect that superstitious behavior is the result of evolutionary adaptation even though it seems counter productive now. Consider an animal which has either a positive or negative experience (finds food or encounters predator). Without the logical machinery to analyze how its actions lead to the result (or if they did) the simplest potentially beneficial behavior modification mechanism would be to either avoid or repeat whatever it was doing at the time of the event. It may be completely unrelated, but with limited analytical potential it nonetheless increases the animal's survival advantage. In humans, this instinct still exists. Our intellectual brain may recognize that wearing a particular item will not repeat the situation that happened last time, but our animal brain still goes by this paradigm and tries to push us in that direction. Like many of our evolutionarily old behavior patterns, this appears to us to be an intuitive drive. Do you agree that what we today call "superstitious" behavior is basically just the expression of ancient instincts that, for many animals in the past and even today, has probably had positive survival value? If superstition is a product of evolutionary needs, then how likely are we to overcome it?