SUPERSTITIONS, GOOD BAD OR INDIFFERENT

Where and when did superstitions originate

Superstitions have been around for a long time. I would venture to say for as long as intelligent humans have. I leave the definition of intelligent up to you. Personally, I think superstitions are stupid even though most of them were started by intelligent, i.e., educated individuals. I wonder how such educated individuals could actually believe in such foolery, although I suspect most go through motions out of habit or to show proper educate. My present wife is among this group, more about her later.

Some of my antics with superstitions

For as long as I can remember, I have never believed in superstitions, I think. As a child I defied them and I still do. Maybe that stemmed from my defiant nature, or because I was shy or just acting like the clown I was, i.e., doings things to draw attention. I laughed at people who ran away to keep from walking over the path of a black cat. I chased after the cat. Whenever I came upon a ladder leaning against a wall, I passed under it, not once but several times. As for breaking mirrors, I broke them deliberately and then stomped on them. I opened umbrellas in the house even though I knew I would receive a clout upside the head or, at least, a good scolding. What better way of being noticed? I nailed up horse shoes the opposite way, maybe to welcome the devil in or to show I didn’t need any good luck. I made my own luck. The number thirteen is my lucky number.

At one time I used to hunt four leaf clovers, not that I felt they would bring me good luck, but they were thought to be scarce. I think the idea of them being scarce is wrong too. I used to find hundreds of them each year. Maybe the patches of clovers behind my house had a high percentage of the freak clover leafs. I placed them in books and gave them away. One thing for certain, they never brought me any luck.

Come to think of it, maybe these are the reasons I am where I am. Nah, I’m pretty much where I want to be, a poor dumb slob coasting along with the wave. I’m neither rich nor poor, neither extremely happy nor sobbingly sad. I’m an average Joe who doesn’t bother or rely on anyone. I’ve made my bed and now I’m lying in it. Ok let’s move forward.

Some of my wife’s superstitions, bless her soul

Take my wife, please. Wow, I can’t believe I did that. My present wife, number three, is a good sole, educated and intelligent. Why she accepted my proposal, I’ll never know. She is religious, in a strange way, and she has many odd superstitions. She believes in spirits, good ones and bad ones. She has a string of bells on our front door to keep the bad spirits from entering. I never pointed out our three other doors that lacked strings of bells. Do spirits use only the front entrance?

On the dresser in our bedroom, she keeps a shot glass, always filled with water for any thirsty good spirits. If we leave the house for more than a day, she goes to each room and blesses it to keep out any bad spirits. She blesses her two sons each time they leave after a visit. I think I’m jealous; she has never blessed me. Maybe that’s a good thing; she’s well aware of my nonreligious beliefs. Maybe she thinks I might explode in a ball of flame.

Once I caught her opening an umbrella in the house so it could dry. I feigned wide eyed disbelief and asked her if she didn’t believe bad luck would rain upon us for this act? She had never heard of such a foolish belief. But then, she does come from a foreign and odd culture. Bless her soul.

Another strange thing she does after mentioning something bad that might happen, she does a little thing that’s like pretending to spit three times to nullify what she just said. It’s means the same as knocking on wood three times. The first time she did this, I thought she was choking

When I find a coin lying on the ground, I pick it up and put it in my pocket feeling fortunate I was recouping some of my lost coins. I pay no attention to weather it was heads or tails facing up. Not my wife. She rubs it between her fingers and blesses it. She says if you don’t do that, you end up with all the misfortunes of the person who lost the coin. I always give her the coins I find if she is with me. She goes through her rigmarole and puts it in her purse. Bless her soul. I just smile and shake my head.

Anyway, do you get the idea of what I’m trying to get across? Superstitions, most of which have religious beginnings are what you make of them. Observing some of my wife’s strange superstitions, Bless her soul, for she is not one of the blind faith followers. I imagine firm believers are loaded down with them. You know if you say bless their soul, after saying something derogatory about someone, you are forgiven?

You can find more about superstitions Here and Here

MY VIEWS ON THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

In the beginning Man roamed the earth and saw that it was good.

Year: somewhere around 75,000 to 50,000 BCE or sooner or later. No one can say for sure, so it is okay to be vague about these things.

Place: in a cave somewhere in Europe, in the jungles of South America, in the outback of Australia and in the planes of Africa and probably many other places in the ancient world where early man had spread taking with him his traditions and beliefs. We all evolved from the same lineage with the same mindset. It is where we settled that changed us physically.

Someone is telling the story of the beginning of their people as told to them by their forefathers. Back then, memories were developed to a more sophisticated degree than we now have. That was because they didn’t have anything to write their stories down on. They wrote in the dirt but that didn’t last long, besides no one could agree on which alphabet to use. But they had become fairly good artists and the painted their stories of cave walls. They were fairly intelligent too, i.e., they knew enough not to place their pictures low on the wall where just anyone could alter or add to their works like the graffiti artists of today. Back then they didn’t have copyright laws.  

“In the beginning,” depending on what part of the world early man had spread, “there were only two of us, the Great Mother and the Great Father,” began the story tellers. This was back when women came first and men were only kept around as meat providers and breeders, somewhat like most societies of modern days, women were looked upon as goddesses. Come to think of it, this too is how it is today, except for a few religious groups and other sects of society. “they came down on a beam of sunlight,” the stories went on, “out of a great snow storm, out of a rain cloud. They lived in this beautiful tree, cave, dugout, igloo.” And the story wend on telling how the two lived a blissful life and produced many offspring that spread throughout the planes, jungle, forest,” and so on and so forth.

They told other stories too. One was about a flood caused by many days of rain and as many thunder storms, they knew or the thunder gods were angry about something. In the case of the snow people, it was a sudden hot spell that broke up the ice they, they too, felt the wrath of their god of snow. And only one family of their small group survived because they managed to secure a larger iceberg that didn’t melt down so fast. They took with them a small complement of sled dogs. Everyone else in their world drown, i.e., their small world around them, for they knew of no one else. And the others made a floating raft of trees and logs tied together with vines or strips of animal hides. They allowed some smaller animals caught in the flood to clamber aboard their floating life savers. They ate a few that didn’t have mates, and spared those with mates and loosed them when the waters receded.

Of course, as they told these stories over time, generation after generation, they added and revised them to their liking and to fit the changing times. The stories morphed from time to time and place to place. But they all had a basic theme.

Our first religion was shamanism. Like some religions of today, shamanism combined speaking to and praising of the spirits and healing the sick and injured. Even back then some realized they could fool another into believing they could be healed by the shaking of a rattle.  Shamanism became popular. These shamans were similar to our modern day televangelists who speak the good word and heal the sick. Of course we all know ancient shaman were just too ignorant for such advanced things. Yet, they used the same tactics as our modern day scammers, oops, that’s an intentional slip of the tongue. Soon shaman failed to fulfill everyone’s needs, and when man grew and spread, they invented more gods, gods of every conceivable kind for every conceivable situation. Each demanded respect, worship and sacrifices offered to them.

The one amazing point I would like to point out here, is, that few know, Shamanism is the oldest religion and is still practiced around the world. What other religion can claim this fact?

That too has not changed much over time, now they not only want your blood, they want your money too, “dig deep brother, the seed money you send today, I promise the lord will triple it for you tomorrow.” He forgot to tell you there is no lord, he knows it, but he doesn’t want you to know it, and he sure as hell isn’t sending you any of what you sent him. He has worked too hard to get it. See how he sweats at his work, see the anguish in his face, see how his hands heal so many, see the piles of letters stuffed with money before him and see how he lovingly caresses it. That mansion he found in France will soon be his new residence where he can spread the word and rake in more money for a mansion in Spain.

Sorry about that, every time I use the word ‘televangelists’, it sends me into a rant, the sorry S.O.Bs. The poor guilt ridden fools who send him their hard earned money believe they can buy their way into salvation, so they aren’t much better than the clowns on TV.

So, now we are down to around eight or ten thousand years ago and man in neck deep in his invented gods. So many no one can count them. Someone comes up with an idea of combining them all into one god. One mighty god, invisible so no one can claim they saw him. Well, that didn’t work out so well, did it? This new god should also know everything about everything and he should know everything that happens and will happen. He shall know what you do every second of every day, and what you think. Even though he knows what is going to happen, he lets you have your way, for some day you will pay.

This intelligent man spread the word to all religious leaders that he was going to hold a seminar in two years. It took that long for the drummers and horsemen to deliver the message and return with everyone’s reply so they knew how many chairs to set up. They could either pay in advance at a 10% discount or pay full price at the gate. 

After the seminar, everyone returned to their regions with huge hangovers. Then more time was lost as each religion build up their story of how their religion developed keeping to the outline of the head religious leader whose throat was slit soon after the seminar for beating one of his Hebrew slaves. Someone said it was a half-breed Egyptian, raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter, and then he fled into the desert not to be heard from for forty years.

All this took many decades and eventually dozens of this new religions, all similar, in that they all had only one god, and yet each a little different. Each began practicing what they believed holding on to the old stories of beginnings and floods and all that crap. Each congregated in a different area. Of course, there were wars as there always have been and they continued to this day and probably will continue into our future. We have been fighting each other since, and before, we began walking upright. And when we meet aliens from other worlds, we’ll jump on them like stink of you know what. We are a warring species; it’s in our blood and will probably take more millions of years before it is bred out of us.

Some religions were more successful than others, mainly because they were either more bellicose or better bullshitters than others, i.e., by force and by deception.

Finally, after a few thousand years, we are right back where we started, only now, with thousands of religious sects, all claiming their set of beliefs are the only true beliefs their god wants us to follow. We cannot come together and agree on any one set of morals, not even between our sexes. It’s no wonder more and more of us see the conundrum of religion. There cannot be a god or gods out there that would want his, her, its subjects going about like we are.

If you don’t believe this, read your bible. That means start at the beginning and read to the end. Don’t just pick out little tidbits here and there and make it apply to what you think is right. What you don’t find in the Holy Bible you’ll find in the Google Bible.

DID GOD CREATE US, HOW AND WHY? Pt. 2

read part one

Who or what is the cause of these birth flukes             

Maybe the parents are to blame? After all, their genes combined and produced the unfortunate defected human. They raised the child with their set of beliefs and morals. Now the ungrateful brat defies them and wants to marry another of the same sex and with the same affliction. Maybe then, it’s the afflicted ones who are the sick culprits. They grew up unable to shrug off their strange feelings which caused them to suffer in shame and uncertainty because they could not control these feelings? One does not have these feelings unless they are guilty. Certainly these were not the plans God had for them?

Maybe you believe God had nothing to do with it. It’s the individual who is following their desire or giving in to false feelings or has warped ideas of sexual pleasure. No one in their right mind would have such feelings. Just what is a right mind? Does that mean no one is born gay and they become gay as a choice or the result of their lifestyle, their ill begotten desires or lack of morals? I believe science has disproved this. You might say, science has proven God did have something to do with it. It’s in one’s genes at the time of conception, the time one is assigned a soul. How else could one explain all these mishaps of nature, or if you prefer God’s slipups?

Something we cannot deny

There is another group who, not only has feelings of the opposite sex they appear to be, but they may also display the sexual or reproduction organs of both sexes in various combinations or ways. Hermaphrodite is the old term we used to refer to them. The proper term used today is “intersex.” Humans that are born with typical reproductive organs but have atypical clitoris/penis, or a male who develops breasts. These abnormalities happen at about the same frequency as people who are born with red hair. Some attempts are made at birth to rectify the problem and victim usually ends up scarred or deformed. Others are not aware of a problem until they reach puberty and a perceived male begins developing breasts. How does he explain this to his girlfriend?

This human oddity has a Greek God in their honor, Hermaphroditus, an effeminate male offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite gods of sexuality.

Some closing remarks

Remember now, if you are one who believes God created us or He has specific plans for us, you can’t have it both ways. If God is in charge, what is He trying to communicate to us? Seriously, this is befuddling, answering that God works in mysterious ways or we know not His reason is not a good enough answer. It’s a copout and is not intelligent.

I know, for a fact, animals other than humans, are born with these abnormalities, if that is what they are. I have raised and cared for many different animals during my lifetime and have observed these traits: Roosters mimic hens and try to lay eggs; hens try to crow and mount other hens. I have observed this also in rabbits and tropical fish. Fish are notorious for this. Have you ever had you leg humped by a bitch, i.e., this is the proper term for a female canine, or have you ever witnessed it? If you haven’t, you have lived a very sheltered life. These human oddities explained above are facts, and if you don’t believe that, open your eyes and look it up. I don’t think you’ll find it in the Bible. On second thought, maybe you will.

Some may think these displays are driven by over sexed or sick individuals. Of course they are. The sex drive of most living things is strong and would naturally be displayed strongly. That’s our makeup in nature. It comes second only to our will to survive.

Think of this. How often have raped women been accused of willful participation? Were they mealy participating or were they using a survival tactic? I imagine our cave dwelling ancestors either gave in or were done away with. Even the victim is sometimes uncertain and suffers feelings of guilt. If a child is conceived during this criminal attack, is the woman obligated to carry it to birth because it’s the womanly thing to do? This is sick in this day of test tube babies or in vitro fertilization where sex is completely out of the picture. Maybe in a hundred or so years, we will have a mechanical god, an offspring of the computer so many of us now warship.

Too many cannot visualize themselves in a rape victim’s place. Too many with perceived good intentions do not fully analyze what they are actually doing. Let the mother die, save the unborn zygote, we’ll put it in a can and decide later who will raise it. Remember the Rhesus monkey experiment?

My vote for a god is the minute particles that make up the universe. I’m going outside now, get some rays and bow down before my living god. Have a pleasant day folks.