Today is Friday, May 13. That’s right, it’s Friday the 13th. There are people around the world who are afraid of what bad things might happen today. Odds are that there will be some, after all bad things happen everyday. Then again there may even be a perceived increase in negative occurrences due to a heightened awareness resulting from superstitious nonsense.
The biggest problem with Friday the 13th is that it’s all arbitrary. Nothing in the way we track weeks and months is based on anything real. The New Year begins roughly 10 days after the winter solstice, so New Years is arbitrary. Our Gregorian calendar is divided into 12 months, of varying lengths, again this is arbitrary. A seven day week is something we’re accustom to (and something Adventists make a big deal about), but again, it’s an arbitrary division.
The only thing creepy about it is that it’s so rare for the 13th day of a given month to fall on a Friday. But it does happen, in fact it’s just as often as it would be for any other day to fall on a Friday.
What possible mechanism could there be for the very nature of the universe to be altered based on a series of arbitrary coincidences of purely human origin?
While it may be Friday the 13th here, that only applies to those utilizing the Gregorian calendar. For those who use a lunar calendar (hey, actually based on something) it’s not the 13th (or if it is on some lunar calendar then it’s quite the coincidence). So again, how is it that our current calendar, one that’s only been in use for a few centuries, could have any effect on anything?
For that matter, how does the relative direction of travel of a darkly colored feline when compared to your own direction of travel effect anything?
What impact does where you step have on your living maternal ancestor’s spines? Unless of of course you’re stepping on her spine, but some random crack hundreds or even thousands of miles away? If there’s any validity to this one, then it’s a wonder that either survived when I was a little kid in eastern Oregon spending much of the summer walking around on cracked, dry dirt.
How does saying that something good is about to happen impact what is actually about to happen and how does knocking on some nearby wood undo the effect of the words you just said?
Again, the only way that any of these things could possibly have any impact is by making the superstitious person more aware of what’s happening, thus making it seem like more bad things are happening, or by shaking the confidence of the person enough to create a self fulfilling prophecy.
If I’m missing something, please fill me in.