Are you superstitious and/or what is your take on those who are?

by StoneWall 2 Replies latest jw friends

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  StoneWall

  Was reading on another thread (Ouija board) and it got me to thinking about a friend of mine who was almost

  paranoid about anything and everything. He was very superstitious.

  When he helped me on a few job sites and would say stuff like don't walk under the ladder or careful with that

  mirror, if you break it seven years bad luck (we did a few re-models on older homes together and the mirrors were

  to old medicine cabinets that had rusted inside and were going to the landfill) I would purposely walk under the ladder

  after making sure no one was on it to drop something on my head, then I would take my hammer and smash the mirror

  on the cabinet. The look on his face to me was priceless. It was like he kept waiting on something bad to happen to me

  and it never did. The things in his life that he was most afraid of or his so called demons were now laying in a pile of

  debris at my feet. This may sound a bit harsh to some of you but I was trying to help him to get a grip on reality.

  One day we were going down the road and a black cat crossed in front of us on the road ahead. He

  immediately started making signs of the cross with his finger across my windshield on the truck like it was going to

  protect us from something bad. I just laughed when I saw what a hold superstitions had on him. He is also one

  of the guys that dared me to go into two supposedly haunted house years ago and they stayed on the outside

  while I went inside. He kept yelling out to me after I was in "Are you alright" and I would answer back yeah don't

  see anything. But after about the fourth time of him yelling I decided to play a little joke and not answer to see if

  he would be willing to come in and look for me or if he would be to scared too. After what seemed like an eternity

  he finally came to the front door, all trembling and pale but would not step inside. I waited a few more minutes then

  snuck out the back door and came around the front corner of the house and screamed at the top of my lungs. He took

  off running through the bushes without even stopping to see what or who was screaming. LOL

  Yeah I had a lot of fun with him and others that were superstitious. It's been about 25 or more years ago

  that happened and I still can't help but laugh reflecting back on it.

  What are some of you guys/gals experiences with yourself or others and superstitions?
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  leftbelow

  I think being a witness effectively beat that out of me.
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  HintOfLime

  Witnesses are equally superstitious, they just call it 'demons', 'holy spirit', or something else instead. They might not use good luck charms - but they still have the same brain wiring that causes false positives in pattern recognition, and will embrace superstitious behaviors.

  I remember reading about an experiement they did with two birds. One bird received a snack every time it bobbed it's head (the control). The other bird (isolated from the first) received a snack completely at random.

  But a strange thing happened, both birds began to constantly bob their heads. Apparently, the bird just happened to be bobbing it's head a few times when the random snack appeared, and it created a 'false pattern' in the bird's mind that it's actions had triggered the snack to appear.

  Superstition is essentually caused by this faulty sort of association. Our brain is a pattern matching machine. In fact, companies use neural network software to detect fraud, because neural networks are very apt at learning and detecting subtile patterns. Unfortunately, sometimes we think we detect a pattern when no pattern really existed, and when we do - a superstition is born.

  "My sports team won two games in a row, and both times, I was wearing this particular jersy. It must be the jersy!!" For some reason, once these patterns take hold, we'll ignore anything that doesn't match the pattern, but grab on tightly everytime something does.

  - Lime