I was trawling the Internet recently and I came across the phrase ‘It is bad luck to be superstitious.’ What a silly phrase… Click. Click. Scroll. But then somewhere, whirring in the back of my brain, a little voice shouted: “Hey, that’s not actually a bad idea!”
So it is bad luck to be superstitious, true or false?
I think its true. Why? Well if you are not superstitious, everything is down to science and chance, nothing else. Nothing is down to luck everything is calculated and rational.
But doesn’t that take all the fun out of life? Everything can be explained.
“Oh that massive meteor that was going to hit the earth just missed, that was lucky!” – Person A
“Well actually it was down to the Earths gravitational field not being that of the equivalent field cast by the sun, moon and all nearby planets dust rock et cetera, therefore due to the angle that the meteor was descending at and the gravitational forces acting upon the relative mass of the meteor, then there was no possible way it could enter the atmosphere…” – Person B
How dull was that!
Luck is so much more fun, it can twist things around, it can make things seem possible or impossible, it can give you hope, and take it away.
If you believe in superstitious things like don’t walk under ladders, then you walk under one, and a bucket of water falls on your head, was that unlucky/misfortune or was it destined to happen?
What actually is the definition of luck? According to Mr Oxford its
“Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions”
and according to Mr Cambridge its
“The force that causes things, especially good things, to happen to you by chance and not as a result of your own efforts or abilities”
So its things that happen because of ‘luck’ not of your own making?
Well if you walk under a ladder and something bad happens to you, is that not of your own making? You walked under the ladder, so that isn’t unlucky because of you disobeying a superstitious, but because you walked under the ladder in the first place!
So what have we established? Well if you believe in superstition it is easy to use it as a scapegoat. At the end of the day though, it would seem that most things have a rational explanation which are not necessarily linked to the superstition, or the actions you took to abide by it, or ignore it.
Comments and Questions! Do you believe in luck and are you superstitious? If so or if not why?
