As a person who does not believe in superstition, one sometimes has a difficult time convincing others that their belief is nonsense. You can try and put up the most scientific arguments but a really superstitious person will nevertheless not believe you. Nevertheless I believe that superstitions, just like religious belief in general, is in decline.
For one thing, it has always been more common for women to have rules on how to behave because they were the gender who was suppressed and less important. Men are just as superstitious but it is mostly women who have certain ceremonies to do, who are considered impure at times and then are restricted as to where to go and more. With the long-due empowerment of women, they become more and more equal and don’t want to stick with such superstitions! They will stop following the rules and less and less people will believe in them.
There are however of course the individual superstitions, too. In a regular talk when someone tells you about a superstition, for example that the day of a moon eclipse is a day of bad luck, you can always say that you don’t believe in this. The other one will object and count four, five or more bad things that happened to him or people in his close surrounding on exactly such days. If you answer that you never cared about eclipse days and that never anything happened to you, your superstitious discussion partner will just reply ‘Maybe it does not happen to you, but to me it does! It is just a bad luck day for me!’ Well, that is something you cannot object to anymore!
Whenever something bad happens on a moon eclipse day, this person will remember it is his bad luck day. He will start living his life according to that, even though bad things happen on other days, too. There are hundreds of such superstitions and predictions of when good things happen and when bad things happen. These superstitions become like anchors in such people’s lives. They live from one such day to another, insecure, always fearing that on their bad luck days something will happen to them!
The interesting tendency is then to create new superstitions. If three times something bad happened after they had been swimming on a Monday evening, they will just stop going for a swim on Mondays. And that is what they will tell their children as if it was a scientific truth. I believe that religion is responsible for this pattern of thinking, for the need to hang on to some superstition.
The funny thing is that people only believe in such things like ‘bad luck’. The base of such superstition is the scriptures and there you will find much more detailed threats of what could happen by mysterious ways. People don’t believe however that demons would come in the night and exchange their baby with yours for example. Such belief is too unrealistic even for superstitious people! No, they don’t believe in such nonsense! They believe that you can get ill just by starting a journey on a wrong day but they don’t believe in demons and such beings!
In earlier times however people believed that, too. They were afraid of all kinds of beings and all kinds of events that just nobody believes in today anymore. And just how such belief slowly vanished, superstition will just fade away and hopefully only be a part of fairy tales and old people’s stories someday.
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