02-May-2010, 05:39 PM
It would be interesting to know how superstitions start. In India, there might be several million superstitions, each of which must have started with a single influential person and spread to the masses.
For example, a priest might say to his quarry, "The flower I kept on the head of the idol fell on the left side. This means something bad is going to happen to the family." At that point the hapless devotee would ask, "What can we do to avoid the calamity?" You know what the priest would say. If the devotee refuses to pay, he would blame the flower that fell on the left side as the cause of his next calamity. So the word would spread like wild fire. The only beneficiary of this scam are the crooked priests.
Likewise, a man in a car accident tries to find an excuse for his accident and remembers that a black cat ran across his car when he left home. Now poor black cats are blamed for every accident. Such are the stupidities of man's primitive thinking.
What do you guys think about this?
For example, a priest might say to his quarry, "The flower I kept on the head of the idol fell on the left side. This means something bad is going to happen to the family." At that point the hapless devotee would ask, "What can we do to avoid the calamity?" You know what the priest would say. If the devotee refuses to pay, he would blame the flower that fell on the left side as the cause of his next calamity. So the word would spread like wild fire. The only beneficiary of this scam are the crooked priests.
Likewise, a man in a car accident tries to find an excuse for his accident and remembers that a black cat ran across his car when he left home. Now poor black cats are blamed for every accident. Such are the stupidities of man's primitive thinking.
What do you guys think about this?