I didn't want to begin this post on my blog without speaking about TRUTH. So here I go: When Einstein was asked about truth by the young J. Fresco (today 99), Einstein said,"We cannot see things as they really are only as our receptors can observe them. You can't see the craters of the moon unless you look at them through the telescope."

You could say that the metal table is smooth, but if you put it under a microscope you will see that it is very rough. If you magnify it even more it will seem even more different. There are radio waves passing through your house continuously but you can't sense them.There is bacteria everywhere you cannot see them unless you have a microscope.

Relativity can have you fooled. When you are flying over a sea at a high altitude the waves and the trees appear to be standing still in relation to your position. When you get to a lower altitude much closer, you can see the motion of the waves and the wind pushing the trees. If you never could get that close you would assume at first site that these are fixed. If an airplane hits the water at high speed it's like hitting concrete, but when you dive in the water a meter away you go through it without any trouble. If a water strider could write about water it would be the water according to the water strider. You cannot assume that everything is as your sensors (eyes,ears, etc.) pick them up to be. Further investigation is always required to what you observe in order to see something closer to what it is. That is why usage of language like,"it seems to me," is a more applicable way of speaking. (More of this in my evolution post in the near future.)

Someone may say, "well, I am sitting on a chair my butt is touching the chair- that is truth."As we now know that matter is made out of atoms, the "chair" electrons and your "butts" electrons, are repelling each other, and your nerves cells sense this repulsive force and that is what we call touch. Even by cutting the chair you are still not touching any of its matter you are merely pushing it out of the way using the electron repulsion-repulsion forces.

We can hold things because no surface is perfectly flat at the micro- level and friction exists. Things can stick together via chemical bonds, latching on to surface imperfections, cohesion/adhesion, etc. but no matter touches for those to occur. You have never touched anything. I am sorry about that.

So as you can see, by observing things with your naked eye, can have you formulating a lot of different theories about what things are, why they occur and how they occur. That is how terms like, superstition, metaphysics, mysterious, intelligent design, psychic, and so on, come into existence.

Being a truth seeker by meditating on your navel will have you formulating all sorts of assumptions or blaming an event on metaphysical reasons. Seeking what is most applicable through the scientific method is a saner way of looking at the world. To know the truth, you would need to know everything, that is impossible. You can only learn what you discover with the tools you have available. If better tools are made available, you will find that you are discovering new knowledge that was always there, but you were only able to observe it with the new tool. Example: Hubble telescope. Unlike meta-physicians, scientists don't claim to have all the answers, but they are trying to tackle one answer at a time.

Oxford dictionary defines superstition: "Superstition, is the belief that particular events happen in a way that cannot be explained by reason or science; the belief that particular events bring good or bad luck."

A person told me once it doesn't hurt anyone if someone knocks on wood, believing that it takes away the bad luck or wears an eye to keep away the evil eye.

Jacque fresco: "You have people wearing a rabbit's foot for good luck, don't forget the rabbit had 4- didn't do him any good."

Well that doesn't hurt anybody at face value but the belief that an event is prevented through a rabbit's foot, an eye or knocking on wood etc. creates a value system that stops people from attempting to stop the unfortunate event from occurring. The disease history of the world has shown that superstition stands by and watches someone die thinking that it is due to misbehavior or being cursed. Scientists which have human concern seem to have come up with cures, preventions and immunizations in an attempt to combat most killer diseases from our past.

Every time a pilot flies into an airport he takes the current weather conditions of the airport he applies it to his/her calculations to ensure he/she can stop on the landing runway available. If he/she can't he/she either lowers the weight of the airplane by burning or dumping more fuel, and if that doesn't work he diverts to another more suitable airport for the airplane's weight. He doesn't rely on good luck to stop before the end of the runway. If the weather is marginal he/she doesn't rely on luck for the weather to get better once they reach the airport, he/she takes more fuel to have available to have more options to go to another airport or wait for the weather to clear up. The laws on fueling an airplane are all built around the possible scenario of having to go somewhere else or waiting. When a pilot is handed his/her license he/she doesn't get a rabbit's foot with it.

I don't think anyone wants to fly in an airplane were the pilot relies on luck to get you there safe.

Whats curious though is that the person who relies on luck and is superstitious will drive slower in foggy conditions, or an icy road attempting to prevent the unfortunate event from happening. They don't rely on the good luck charm hanging from the rear view mirror, which is a massive contradiction. Analyzing the external conditions and recognizing the threats as your senses can detect them and taking preventative measures to attempt to stop disaster from occurring is a scientific approach, it is most unfortunate that we don't include this in every aspect of our social life.

Superstition prevails when people don't have enough information and when they have certain beliefs that make them reject any new information- the latter is well explained in my Homeostasis post.

The origins of superstition can be traced back to the ancient days in primitive tribes when they didn't have any way of looking at things and they used theories (superstition) to attempt to explain floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and so on. When the chief of a tribe was asked why there are earthquakes, wanting to gain advantage of the situation and being raised superstitious himself, he would say:"The mountain is angry you need to make a human sacrifice." if the series of earthquakes stopped in that instance, that belief was reinforced and repeated in the future in an attempt to stop the disaster from occurring. Later they found out what caused earthquakes and stopped this behavior. They stopped believing in the anger of the mountain.

King Leonidas of Sparta bound by Laws, before combining forces with the Athenians to stop the attempt of the Persians from taking Greece. He went and consulted the oracle. The oracle told him not to go to war because all Greece will fall anyway. He defied them and didn't believe them he went to the hot gates and tried to stop them in their tracks. Had the Greeks not defended out of deep belief in the word of an oracle, the Persian empire would of stopped the Greek civilization from spreading into the western world, and the world as we know it today would be very different. It was the defiance of superstition that allowed the civilization to push forward into the western world.

B.F. Skinner explained how superstition is developed through Skinner's box. Skinner's box housed either a pigeons, rat or mouse and this allowed him to observe many behavioral patterns of animals which he later observed in people. On his observation related to superstition he placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic machine that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior". He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.

One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a 'tossing' response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return

The pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic machine with their "rituals." The experiment is said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if they were causing the presentation of food through their superstitious behavior. This developed because they memorize the action they were doing in the time that food was presented and repeated it to try and get the same result. Something like some cultures do when they step in a friend's new house with the right foot or call jinx when saying the same thing at the same time. Others don't walk under ladders because at some point something bad happened right after walking under a ladder, coincidentally, and the seed was already planted before. The associative memory combined with this coincidence to reinforce the belief. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder.

So the recipe to create a superstition seems to be: a combination of a few accidental connections between a ritual and a favorable consequence and this is enough to set up and maintain a certain type of behavior in spite of many other instances which the ritual didn't bring about the favorable consequence.

So the less information people have the more superstition exists. When people found out how lightning occurred they let go of their metaphysical beliefs for that particular subject. When someone got struck by lighting in the field close to my house, the local people said that it was a witch doctor that killed him using lighting because he was a bad person and a lot of people wanted him dead. Failing to realize that if you are standing in an open field when there is lighting you are primary target number one. Since you are the quickest route to the ground- a very good conductor of electricity. That's another thing, people seem to match things to the event to make their belief fit. They have heard other such stories from friends, scary movies etc. Since they don't investigate further or don't have enough information available to them, they will stick the event to their easy explanation of metaphysics "the witch doctor did it."

What people should say is "I don't know why that happened," and seek to investigate further. Some don't have enough information available to them to be able to pull out of ignorance. No access to information can also be the reason for ignorance. Oppression of people by under-informing them and supporting their already delusional superstitions in order to gain advantage over the group is the horror that is very much alive and thriving today.

We also seem to have some of those people that are journalists who are not very scientifically literate. They post scientific journals that instead of them having gone into the bin because the result of a single experiment could not be reproduced. They are intercepted by these uninformed-cerebrally-insufficient journalists who end up posting a page and sell it as fact, which misinforms the already ignorant public. Its normally found in the newspapers or some fashion magazine starting with the words, "scientific research shows..." The only way I can explain their intentional misguidance is that they will sell anything that will give them money. Having fallen a victim many times to these pseudoscience articles I find myself always triple checking with other sources before accepting new information. But in a monetary driven world, whatever sells is what helps the journalists eat.

Another achievement of the monetary system is big business financing (intentionally corrupting) research were the result is in favor of the corporation. Example, A researcher from a certain tobacco company claimed that a puff from an ecigarette is equivalent to drinking a cup of coffee. Vested interest corrupts information and unfortunately we have scientists who have children to feed and yachts to pay off. We fall victims to more subtle type of research were the results cannot be easily criticized by the uninformed public.

Conclusion, it's not only our fault that superstition and false beliefs is the bedrock of our day to day life. It is also the people who have something to gain from ensuring that the relevant information is not delivered. A King/Queen has people making a hype about his/her existence and normally the superstition (lie) is created to benefit the leading group (royalty in this case.) If people knew the truth about their leaders, that they are well informed in area A or B but badly informed in area C, just like everyone else, people would lose confidence in their leaders. So leaders falsify information when it threatens their position of advantage to maintain the upper hand.

You often see in movies when people are going back to the future, they have a lighter in their hands and when they are threatened they say, "Behold, I can make fire come out of my hands!" and they light up the lighter. This gets the people to fear him as a powerful sorcerer.

Good news though if you are reading this I have planted the seed in your mind, to always question what is presented to you. But you have to water it so as to shed more seeds into society. Learning more and talking or writing to people about these things is key to our survival. It is only normal to carry some of the primordial slime as we attempt to free ourselves from the soup but one value at a time could lead to infinite possibilities of progress.

(Next few posts will be to expose the people who mislead and exploit desperate people through metaphysics, mysteriousness, intelligent design, psychic powers, and busting the ghostbusters. Stay tuned.)