The Halloween season is in full swing, a time for celebrating people's fascination with the macabre and the supernatural. While it can be fun to cast aside the veneer of everyday life and revel in such nonsense, the line between entertainment and reality must remain clear. Unfortunately, this is often not the case and the inevitable result is the aggrandizement of ignorance.
For those not aware, last Friday was the 13th, a day culturally stigmatized as unlucky. But the intelligent mind has to discern that nothing actually distinguishes it from any other day of the year except the human imagination. The smart person must differentiate between the truth and the products of the imagination masquerading as the truth. If you spent last Friday just as you would any other, it bodes well for you.
Superstition lures in the weak-minded, which explains its greater prevalence in more primitive cultures. But smart people often fall prey to its irrationality as well. Even in modern America, many buildings are conspicuously missing a 13th floor, which is just one of any number of examples illustrating that superstition is still alive and well. This says many things about our culture, none of which are flattering.
Even in ancient times, great minds made observations and theories that have stood to this day. One would hope that modernization would lead to smarter people, but this is far from true. We still live in a world in which people tend to believe whatever they wish, regardless of the facts. In 2006, stupidity is every bit as prominent as it ever was.
Our society is in an intellectual quagmire where the whims of the imagination are valued above the laws of reality. In the case of superstitious beliefs, the vital concept of causality is blindly ignored. Every cause has an effect, but people tend to lose the connection somewhere along this continuum. Hence, the victorious gambler who attributes his good fortunes to his lucky rabbit's foot. To the mind unencumbered by superstition, skill and probability are the obvious forces at work.
The important thing to remember is that reality is not something that is up for interpretation ' it can only be observed. So, when people simply believe whatever they feel sounds good
they are abandoning the only thing that separates us from common beasts ' the thinking mind. It is the only tool we have to carve out a happy and successful life on Earth, and the entire notion of the supernatural is a betrayal of it.
So this Halloween, remember that while ghost stories might be entertaining, dead people are just that ' dead. A million unverified stories about unexplained phenomenon are still not going to resurrect them. There is a logical explanation for everything, no matter how elusive. Similarly, all fortune-tellers are frauds, no matter how convincing their fraud might seem. If you read your horoscope in the newspaper and marvel at how accurate it is, remember that vague writing is the key to securing this result.
Arguing for the truth is not fun, as people tend to be resentful about having their beliefs challenged. But this is usually rooted in the misconception that there is nothing awesome about the world around us. People grow dissatisfied with the supposedly mundane, everyday world and sprinkle some fantasy on top to spice it up. Unfortunately, they have simply failed to see the miraculous in the familiar.
The world in which we live is actually quite amazing as it is. Thus, everything falling under the supernatural is merely an extension of what's already out there. Superstitions can temporarily ease the mind during a stressful exam. The notion of ghosts is rooted in continued reverence for lost friends and loved ones. If you want to see a wizard perform sorcery, take a trip to the nearest hospital and watch a surgeon save a life. What's so great about telepathy when we can communicate with one another at the touch of a button? And monsters, well they're real enough ' simply turn on the news.
The truth is often both horrifying and incredible. To shy away from it is to pass up both. There are those who argue it is beyond our power to understand the universe, but it's a journey we've already successfully begun. It can be completed, but we must not allow fear or desire to take precedence over our objective power to separate the real from the mystical.
To do so is to abandon one's mind, your only candle in the darkness. 17
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Joe Vance
