arts and culture on Superstition

“I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.”

There may have been a time when people found it easy to believe anything. But we are finding it vastly easier to disbelieve anything. Both processes save the human mind from the disgusting duty of dis...

“Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and ...

In comparison to other societies, Americans and other North Atlantic peoples are naturalistic. Non-Western peoples are frequently concerned about the activities of supernatural beings . . . The wide-r...

Stupidity and ignorance, even if chosen in response to warnings against pride of intellect, do not guarantee love or spirituality.

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.

Religion begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother.

“Spirituality” wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.

Cosmic ingratitude is living in the illusion that you are spiritually self-sufficient. It is taking credit for something that was a gift. It is the belief that you know best how to live, that you have...

It is always crucial to remember that our beliefs are formed not only through reason and argument but also through social conditioning.

Heavenly Father, it is astounding how many ways we find to doubt You. At times we doubt Your power and Your ability to do actual miracles in our lives. In other situations, we doubt that Your methods ...

Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.

I know most Americans today do not worship Baal, but when I look at the church in America, I fear that we have our own Baals that demand our worship. I see so many people bowing down before prosperity...

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propos...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously declared that experiencing a story—any story—requires the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” In Coleridge’s view, a reader reasons thus: “Yes, I know Coleridg...

Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in [the twenty-first century] many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?

A strange species we are, we can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable,...

Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.

Ignorance is the mother not of devotion but of heresy.

[People in cities] turn to false gods, such as power, fame, possessions, privilege, and comfort.

The mere fact that a belief is unpopular at present (or at some other time) is interesting from a sociological point of view but evidentially irrelevant.

After the Enlightenment in the West, our collective imagination emptied the cosmos of supernatural life, as sure as industry emptied Cape Cod of cod.

Tradition is a willingness to read Scripture, taking into account the ways in which it has been read in the past. It is an awareness of the communal dimension of Christian faith, which calls shallow i...

The influence of the familiar on our lives is something that advertisers never forget. The point of advertising is to capitalize on real needs or to create needs and then to provide a product to fill ...

Don't take the fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

Human spectacle making is like sorcery—an enchantment, a spell, the creation of an image that calls for a response from our inner longings. Idolatry is the original tele-vision, the bringing of a far-...

There was what an Orthodox Hasidic rabbi had said on a flight westward. He’d put his prayer shawl in the overhead compartment and sat down, sweeping aside the tassels dangling from his pockets. And so...