Superstitions

Feb 10, 2021

Superstitions # People believe what they want to. W.H. Auden has a beautiful line in The Shield of Achilles: “They (soldiers) marched away enduring a belief Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.” Rational people can rationalize or justify almost anything. We are good at self-deception. All ideologies can be self-serving and delusional. That’s why philosophy, history and great literature is such a good guide to reality. Ancients # The Ancient Greeks, often seen as deeply superstitious, lived in a religious world shaped by a rich array of oracles, seers, and signs that they used to manage uncertainty about the future. ...