Superstitions

Mum's side of the family wrapped itself around superstition like a warm blanket on a chilly night.  I grew up listening to my grandmother reading our horoscopes to us over the phone and my aunt telling fortunes with playing cards.  Everyone was a believer in dreams, cards, astrology, crystal ball gazing, palmistry-- you name it and at least one of us believed it.  I taught myself how to do my own natal chart using the books laying around my grand's living room, read Edgar Cayce quite young and some of the Seth books, was familiar [in principle anyways] with channeling and ghosties and all manner of spooks.  Two relatives saw a disembodied spirit of a woman down the cellar at the same time-- no problem.  Another one wore an Italian horn around the neck-- I knew the finger signs for it and what it meant, when to invoke it, and how to "jinx" others at will.  The psychotic psychic fair carnivale atmosphere blended right in with the house active alcoholics, child abuse, and a standard version of a major religion.

I began with fits and starts to break away from all of these things in my adolescence.  Much to the horror of my mother, I traded in my childhood religion for various shades of fundamentalism-- all of which was quite against the "evils" of fortune-telling.  I discarded that and returned to embracing the grip that superstitions had on me.  As a young adult, I tried bunches of non-christian theologies and polytheisms.  In the midst of non-new age witchery, I again jettisoned some of the errant nonsense I'd be taught in my youth.  The astrology went first.  The rest of it followed.  Then I found that the superstitions of my youth were also intimately involved with [other peoples'] paganism.  I tried being a "cultural" pagan without any religious beliefs.  I said I was a cultural pagan but secretly I was hoping that those sessions of raising energy and the rest did something.  I had some run-ins with various representatives from the witch/new age/wiccan/pagan/heathen/ groups around me both face-to-face and on-line.  It all blew apart and became too stupid and too hard to maintain.  I defected. 

I answered the question, "How's that cultural pagan thing working out for you" with a heart-felt "Not too well at all."  I became an atheist.  My brain was relieved.  I no longer had to get it to assume awkward twisting intellectually-dishonest positions in order to endeavor to blend in even a little bit with the folks around me.  I became more of my true self.

When I was in the throes of pentecostal-ism, one of the mantras that we used was the bullshit lie that "It takes more faith to believe in evolution than it does to believe in [Genesis] creation."  My schooling, particularly science classes, should have left me better equipped than that.  But it didn't.  It was the very earliest days of Unintelligible Design.  The biology teacher was saying things like "the seven days in Genesis is equal to the seven ages" in an effort to counteract our [there were several of us Jesus fags] extreme fundamentalism.  I didn't know that evolution was not something to be believed.  Properly, evolution is a theory that one accepts in part or in totality or not at all.  I didn't even know how to find evidence, never mind evaluate it.  I learned some of those skills as I veered deeper into an atheist's worldview.  I am still learning.

My dad witnessed all of the changes I was going through.  I remember he told me a story.  It went like this:  A woman would never allow her kids to throw their friends' coats on the bed.  One day one of her kids thought to ask why.  "Because that is what my mother did," she replied.  So the kid went off to ask grandmother.  Grandmother said, "Your mother's little friends had lice."  Dad then explained to me carefully about how superstitions come into being. I kind of got it, but not enough to be able to examine the legacy of crap I was handed from mum's family.  Later on, I heard another version of the same story involving cutting off the ends of a roast before putting it into the oven.

I think there is supposed to be some kind of cutesy ending or witty moral but I don't have one.  I've found that critical thinking skills are crucial to guarding against gullibility.  And I just keep on learning.  Or, next time you cut the ends off of your roast before putting it into the oven, go ask your mother and grandmother why.  Traditions get passed down and risk becoming superstitions when the sensible reasons for our actions fade.  Or, now through the agent of my dad's dementia, his own head is filled with errant nonsense and it is of the variety that I cannot penetrate.  Or-- oh screw it.