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Sign up with Google Sign up with FacebookQ: How are Chinese non-religious, and yet very superstitious at the same time?
It doesn't make much sense. "I don't believe in a higher power, but only in luck and omens as derived from the symbolic significance of numbers."
Someone explain it to me.
10 years 26 weeks ago in General - Other cities
Why don't all religious people think it is bad luck to open an umbrella indoors ? One evil doesn't mean other will follow.
As I understand it, according to experiments made by a man called B F Skinner, superstition is caused by an illusion of control we grant to assumptions made surrounding observations connected with that which we define as good or bad fortune. We open an umbrella indoors as the phone rings and then hear a relative has died and in turn mislead ourselves into believing the two are somehow connected. This then becomes reinforced by circular thinking where we block out that which contradicts our findings and focus on that which confirms our beliefs, thus giving ourselves the illusion of control over random events. It seems this desire to find behavioural patterns and their connections with unconnected events is a universal trait of man. As for the Chinese being non-religious I don't see that as something lacking in their culture, on the contrary I lean very much towards an interest in the more philosophical understanding of life's natural mystic that exists within the Chinese culture as a result of centuries of Taoist teachings seeping into the collective unconscious. Most religions, it seems to me, do little more for their followers than claim ownership of the moral truths that were written in the pages of the human heart long before they were ever put to paper, and cause fragmentation between people under a heirarchical structure of control, rather than uniting them........... And that................is why I follow none but the teachings of the Great Pumpkin! All hail thee, Great Pumpkin!
I was thinking the exact same thing when I was sat outside at four this morning (and yesterday morning) burning bits of paper with pictures of cars and stuff on it with my wife for her grandmother.