Faith in God and the Four Leaf Clover

This little story made me smile. Well, it almost made me laugh out loud.

CHURCHGOERS in Britain are still highly superstitious and centuries of preaching the Gospel have failed to banish belief in omens and portents of good and bad luck.

Indeed?

According to a study, nearly all churchgoers admit to practising superstitious behaviour such as crossing their fingers for luck, touching wood for protection or throwing spilt salt over their left shoulder.

And this is a problem because?

The Christian Church has always been highly antagonistic towards superstition, believing it to be irrational and linked to paganism.

Ah… Of course, competition. Antagonistic is putting it mildly, mind. Rampant persecution along with violent torture and execution of anyone even suspected of paganism is closer to the mark. Of course, one didn’t have to be a pagan to qualify, being the wrong type of Christian was also pretty dangerous, but that’s another matter. That modern day churchgoers should still cling to superstitions really shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, should it?

Dr Francis said that more research was needed into what churchgoers believed and how this compared with what non-churchgoers believed.

Hmm… tricky one, that… non-churchgoers will fall into two broad groups. Those who vaguely believe if pushed and those who believe only what science determines to be true through observation and experiment. The former may indeed be busy throwing salt over their shoulder because it’s lucky – they probably even buy a lottery ticket each Saturday because the purple unicorn tells them that they have to be in it to win it. The latter look upon belief systems as nothing more than superstition, myth and legend and that the probability of winning the lottery makes it a tax on the mathematically challenged. All of which tells us… nothing new.

Dr Francis goes on:

If these kinds of things resist secularisation, so, too, can traditional religious beliefs if people take the trouble to pass them on. It also intrigues me that so many people in church congregations have not tested these practices against the doctrines of their faith.

Given that their faith relies on exactly the same premise; untested superstition; I’m not sure what such an exercise would achieve. I would have thought it entirely conceivable that people prone to accept one superstition would be open to the idea of another. Therefore, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that churchgoers who are exhorted to believe in supernatural beings and occurrences with no empirical evidence to substantiate them, will also believe in lucky four leaf clovers, seven years bad luck for breaking a mirror or good luck from throwing salt over one’s shoulder or the powers of luck from that black cat walking across one’s path (providing you don’t trip over the bugger – that would be unlucky, indeed). It all seems perfectly reasonable to me. Equally, it is entirely logical that a proportion of the population will vaguely believe in luck even though they do not feel sufficiently compelled to attend church – B&Q on a Sunday morning having something of a stronger pull. Others, predictably, reject all superstition. You don’t need a study to figure that one out.

I am not criticising them for that. But it seems to me that those of us who occupy church pulpits and make assumptions about what is in the heads of people in the pews could benefit a lot from just sitting back and finding out what is really in their heads.

There’s no answer to that…

Doncha just love these pointless studies of the blindingly obvious with their entirely predictable conclusions that surprise those who carried them out?