I may have listened to Superstition by Stevie Wonder about sixty gabillion times in my life, but like most songs I listen to, I just liked the sound and barely paid much attention to the actual lyrics. I mean I knew most of the words, but it just never dawned on me that this was almost an unintentional atheist anthem of sorts until I actually read the lyrics:

When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.

Now I’m pretty sure that Stevie didn’t mean the song to have any religious implications, but…they most certainly do.

Superstitions come in all forms. Personally, I used to have superstitions when I played baseball. In fact, if you’ve ever seen a baseball game, you’d notice how rampant superstition is in the entire sport. You’d see players leaping over the foul line, adjusting their cups and batting gloves after every pitch and wear filthy hats and helmets — when they could easily get new ones — all because they think that there is some sort of correlation between this behavior and their performance on the field.

Well, there ain’t.

Their perception of the correlation may affect their outcome, but that has more to do with self-fulfilling prophecy than the actual correlation between a dirty, sweaty hat and striking someone out.

I think superstition is a natural way to find a correlation between our actions and our desired outcome. It’s a kind of our natural trial-and-error method. If you want your plants to grow strong, you might try a couple different things before you realize what’s best for them. The same applies to getting a hit in baseball or praying that your friend or relative overcomes an illness. But once you realize that the plant is wilting, you go hitless in your next 20 at bats and your loved one doesn’t recover, it’s time to try something different.

There’s nothing wrong with trying different things to find the best way to reach a desired outcome, but it becomes superstition when you continue to the behavior after no correlation is found. Superstition is literally defined as :

1. An irrational belief that an object, action, or circumstance not logically related to a course of events influences its outcome.
2. A belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance.
3. an irrational belief arising from ignorance or fear

I used to do superstitious things myself when I played baseball, and I even prayed every once in a while when I was younger just to see if that had any effect on the outcome like I heard people say it would.

Well, it didn’t.

The only thing that allowed me to see that prayer had no effect was that I wasn’t afraid to come to the conclusion that prayer might be bogus. Once you overcome that hurdle of fear, you’re open to then explore other possibilities in reaching your goals that may be more effective.

When someone does something like pray and their prayers aren’t actually answered, what else compels someone to continue this behavior other than fear? I mean even a rat would recognize that taking a certain route through a maze doesn’t get them to the cheese, and they would eventually stop taking that route.

The truth is that prayer makes people feel good. Is it irrational? Hell yeah it is. Is it being dishonest with yourself? Hell yes it is. People know good and well that this superstition has nothing to do with getting a job or allowing someone to be healed, but they feel good believing that someone is up there taking their prayers into account when deciding whether they’re going to get the job or heal their loved one — as if god is someone interfering with the employer’s free will to make them want to hire you or something.

No one can possibly believe that prayers are actually answered. I mean seriously? Everyone has had a prayer or fifty go unanswered and thought at one point “I’m either doin’ this wrong…or this is all bullshit.” They either continue on hoping that one day they’ll ‘do it right’, or they continue with the prayer because they don’t want to face the reality that this is nothing more than a superstition. There’s just no other reason to continue to do something that doesn’t work, time after time. Of course, those times when you do pray and it actually happens also contributes to the perpetuation of the superstition, but once you see someone that didn’t pray get the same result, you should probably realize that there’s no correlation at all. Even if you prayed, and that thing happened, how can you see other people doing the same thing without prayer and continue to think that your prayers have anything to do with your outcome? What’s worse is seeing that people that didn’t pray reach your desired outcome while you continue to pray without reaching it.

Why the dishonesty?

It’s not superstitious to pray, it’s just superstitious to continue to pray after the thing you have prayed for doesn’t happen. Lying to yourself by saying ‘God works on his own time’ doesn’t make prayer any more effective.

I won’t go as far as to say that people with superstitions ’suffer’ like the song says, but I think in the end, we all do. What if we were all focused on finding the real answers instead of the guesses that we’ve come up with so far? Aren’t seven billion heads better than one? My point is that if we’re all on the same page with trying to find the truth, we’ll get there faster than if only a few people are concerned with it while the others are focused solely on what makes them feel good — drawing the false assumption that the only joy to be had is through their superstition. Even if you do find bliss in your ignorance, have the balls to recognize that it’s ignorance instead of masquerading it as your own personal truth.

The quicker we collectively recognize that these superstitions don’t amount to anything outside of our own minds, the quicker we can actually move on with curing all of the nasty things that cause us to run to these superstitions in the first place. You may want warm fuzzies for yourself, but I want people to generally stop the petty divisiveness and general ridiculousness, and no, superstition ain’t the way to get there.

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