Superstition Ain’t the Way

“When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.”

-Stevie Wonder

For tens of thousands of years, superstition was an inefficient but useful way for humans to stay alive. Being the most intelligent animals on the planet, we learned that effects followed causes even if we didn’t understand why. Eventually we came up with our own explanations that made sense to us. These became superstitions.

However, superstitions were different for different groups because they were isolated from one another. They were also different because they weren’t true. A true explanation is true for everyone. As groups intermingled, their competing superstitions would change over time as old superstitions fell out of favor and new ones rose up to take their place. Over millennia, superstitions were propagated and became “the Truth” for the believers of their superstitions.

For a brave few, superstitious explanations weren’t good enough. While comforting in their own way, they didn’t always work. They couldn’t be relied on to predict what was coming. They conflicted with others, so how were you to know which were true? Gradually, over generations, other ways of explaining why things happened began to appear. Culminating eventually into the Scientific Method.

The Scientific Method has revealed the Universe that used to be hidden from us. What used to be considered vengeful or beneficial acts of mysterious superior beings, are now understood as the consequences of fundamental discoverable natural forces and laws. We are essentially identical to those intelligent, but ignorant and superstitious first humans who cowered in caves when the earth shook or lightning crashed. What is different? Our scientific understanding of the world around us.

Science is the most reliable path to truth humans have ever discovered. The improvements in health, standard of living, and knowledge that we enjoy today are due almost exclusively to the application of the Scientific Method to what used to be the inscrutable mysteries that surrounded us.

This progress in understanding has had to fight against superstition every step of the way. That struggle continues, and the forces of ignorance show no signs of giving up gracefully. The leaders of Superstition owe their positions, power, and prestige to the ignorance they promote. The followers of Superstition face the loss of community and harmony if they dare stray from established dogma and question core Beliefs.

Today we are on the brink of a new age of scientific exploration and discovery. We are also at the brink of a planetary societal collapse brought on by climate change, overpopulation, and the wars of ignorance between believers of different Superstitions. The anti-science war waged by the leaders of ignorance will doom us to return to cowering in our caves if we don’t stand up and fight for Truth. I beg you to let go of your ignorance and superstition. It makes us all suffer. There’s a way to overcome the challenges of the future, and superstition ain’t it.