"Ruchlis, Hyman - True" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ruchlis Hyman)

stitions are wrongly believed to be true.
Scientific thinking is very different. We seek facts and expla-
nations of events based on careful observations and logical
reasoning that must be checked by repeated trials to try to elim-
inate the errors that often occur. Then the facts have to be
verified by other careful observers before being accepted as true.
This is not an easy or quick process and mistakes are often


18 Part One: Superstition and Fairy-Tale Thinking

made. Very often it takes years of work by many people to
reach the point where facts and conclusions are considered to
be true. Because mistakes or exaggerations are easy to make
we must be ready to correct, or even change our ideas about
facts as new information becomes available.
In sharp contrast, superstitious belief reflects a lazy way
of thinking. Superstitious people just assume the "facts" and
often believe whatever they imagine to be true. The way this
happens will be described in chapter 4 when the superstition
of astrology is analyzed in detail.
Today, polls show that, despite all our scientific knowledge,
one person in seven in the United States believes in superstitions
like the one about witchcraft. One in four people believe in the
superstition of astrology and more than 1,000 newspapers en-
courage this superstition by publishing "horoscopes" which
supposedly predict for people of different birth dates what they
should or should not expect to happen to them.
Some people have formed groups that perform special witch-
craft ceremonies. There have been reports of animals sacrificed
during such events to ward off bad luck, or to try to accomplish
some other desired goal.
In one tragic case a woman whose child was ill was told
by a person, who claimed to be able to heal sickness by super-
stition, that a demon had possessed the child, causing the dis-
ease. The remedy proposed was to starve the demon by depriving
the child of food. The mother actually did so, and the child
starved to death!
This poor woman was punished with a jail sentence of four
years. The real cause of her child's death was ignorance, which
led her to believe in an ancient superstition about demons caus-
ing illness.
Superstitious belief in witchcraft is more widespread in coun-
tries with many uneducated people and few modern physicians.
People then rely on traditional "witch doctors" or "medicine men"
who try to cure diseases with ceremonies and magic that are
supposed to drive out imaginary demons thought to cause disease.
Witch doctors collect things like skins of snakes and frogs,
skulls or bones of animals, unusual rocks, carvings of animals,
and other objects, all supposed to have magical powers to cure