Superstition

I know that it's bad luck to be superstitious, but nothing else is working, and my head is really hurting and I'm sick of all this worrying about things I can't control

---Blanche

I've been thinking a lot about superstition and mythology lately. I'm not a superstitious person. I don't have a lucky number, lucky hat, lucky shirt, lucky rabbit's foot, or lucky charm of any sort. I'm sure my wife wonders why the hell I don't wear anything but Wilco or Camp Laurel t-shirts and Chuck Taylors if it's not for luck. My attachment to a few comfortable items of clothing are not steeped in any sort of thinking that they bring me luck or some sort of good fortune. Superstition and silly beliefs in mythology drive me crazy. And I don't understand it in any way.

All of it is so brainless. The baseball players who wear the same pair of socks for every game or won't clean the pine tar off their helmet all season. Pitchers avoiding stepping on the chalk line on their way on and off the field. All because they think this helps them win, regardless of any actual evidence.

"Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you'll have good luck." How could people actually buy into this one? Seriously. How is finding the lowest amount of money possible good luck? If luck exist, wouldn't a hundred dollar bill be a hell of a lot luckier than finding a penny?

Of course the worst of all the superstitions and myths is religion. That there are people out there who believe that some guy was born to a virgin mother, turned water into wine and bread into fish, walked on water, died on a cross to only come back to life three days later is just crazy. That may not even be the stupidest one. The guy who fit two of every species on the planet on one boat probably takes that title. I mean if that were true, ha actually took the time to grab a couple of cockroaches and mosquitoes? And how did he know that he grabbed a male and a female of each of them? And what about maggots and leaches?

See, these are the kind of things I think about when I hear these ridiculous myths. Everyone else just thinks about all the cute giraffes and elephants and monkeys. I'm the kid in the back of the class that asks why Noah bothered to save the stink bug and how he checked it for its gender.

Sunday school teachers hated me.

I sometimes think I'm the only person in the world that doesn't have some sort of mythical, unprovable thing that I believe in. Even so many other non-religious people I run into will have some crazy shit they believe that is just as dumb as the Christ/Noah/Moses stories. Just a few weeks ago I was working somewhere that I got to talking with another person about this stuff and making fun of the Christians and Scientologists. But then this person started talking about, you guessed it, astrology. Fucking please.

If anything is as dumb as the bible, it's that. This whole idea that your personality traits are decided by when in the calendar year you are born is laughable. My wife and I are the same "signs" and have many opposite (albeit, we think complimentary) personality traits. And whenever you challenge people on this nonsense, they pull the usual "It's just like you (insert sign here) to be skeptical."

What's even weirder about the astrology thing, is that it is based on something people believed about stars and planets back when they were these mysterious things in the sky. But come on, we've sent rockets and men to these places now. We know that when "Jupiter is in Saturn" or "Mars is crossing Venus" or whatever the fuck those sayings are, it has to do with the coincidence of those planets' orbits and nothing else.

Don't even get me started on fucking Tarot cards.

And people are so dug in to their beliefs even if you can show them that what they believe is bullshit. And they get so damn defensive about it too.

Nothing is a better example of that today than what people believe about medicine.

You've seen the commercials that are on TV. There are so many of these so-called "medicines" that claim to do things that are just impossible. Most of them involve magical weight-loss without having to diet or exercise. My favorite is the "ionized" bracelets that claim to cure back pain and help a bunch of other stuff like your liver and blood pressure and probably sexual prowess, though I don't remember for sure if they claimed that last one. And people believe, even in the face of a complete lack of evidence.

And people go nuts at you when you suggest to them that there is no proof of some remedy they believe in actually works, and in some cases has even been proven not to work at all. Like those bracelets.

I guess I'm thinking about this because I had a cold last week. And whenever you have a cold, people always offer suggestions on fighting it. And most of the suggestions are usually something that has no back-up from any credible scientific studies.

On one of the two days that I was really getting hit hard by the cold I had a job that I had to go to. Most of the people I was working with that day I had never met before. I did the right thing by not shaking hands when I met people and explained that I had a cold. At one point before starting one of the other guys pulled out a case full of pills, set them on the table and said "you should load up on vitamin C."

I said no thanks, and explained that there is no reason to take extra vitamin C when you have a cold because it doesn't help. You would have thought I kicked his dog. This guy was annoyed with me the rest of the day, just because I challenged his belief with something called the truth. He told me that when he's sick he listens to his body, and his body tells him that it works and that his colds are shorter because he takes vitamin C. I told him that I believe what science tells me. I didn't even try to get into the conversation of how he knows how long his colds would have lasted if he didn't take the vitamin C, because that might have led to some psychic conversation that I definitely wasn't interested in.

I just told him how the only thing that has been proven to shorten the length of colds is zinc lozenges and that the whole loading up on vitamin c thing was just as pointless as taking Eccinatia.

Well, guess what? He is a believer in that too. He actually told me at one point that he knew the stuff worked and he didn't care if any studies proved it or not.

This is what I'm talking about. That moron will believe what he already believes even it research were to show that it makes your dick fall off. Just like the creationism believers, he's sticking to his guns no matter what the evidence shows. He actually ended the night by telling me that I should drink fluids with vitamin C because it is a diuretic and will clean the toxins out of my body. I had to double check with my wife (an MD) when I got home, but I figured the diuretic claim was bullshit, and I was right. The completely false things people will believe knows no bounds.

I just can't buy into things without actual evidence. And I think the world would be a lot better place if everyone else were the same way.

Noah's ark is a fable. No bracelet will cure you bad back. Pennies are not good luck. Being born in August did not decide my personality traits. Loading up on vitamin C does not strengthen your immune system (and it's not a diuretic) Eccinatia does not get rid of colds.

And the Tigers lost the World Series because they kept dropping the ball, not because they stepped on the chalk line.