I’m sure that my argument that superstition is fundamentally a-moral will puzzle and might even offend some. Certainly no offense is intended especially as I have known many people (my mother included) who have been both very superstitious and very moral. So I need to be careful in how I explain my thinking here.
To do this I need to explain something about the mechanics of superstition, and to do this I use the analogy of the computer or cash card in order to make the connection with superstition.
Put as simple as I can, superstition is highly mechanistic. If I spoil salt I get bad luck (whatever that is), I have triggered a mechanism that has a bad result. But I can counter this by picking the salt up with my left hand and throwing it over my right shoulder. This is another mechanism; but what if it doesn’t work? Well, maybe I didn’t do it well enough and ultimately I may come to believe it has to be done perfectly for it to work, so I become obsessed with ‘getting it right’ and perhaps so obsessed that nothing else matters!
Back to my analogy.
If I use my card to draw money from a cashpoint, the machine is interested in only one thing, which is whether I have used the correct pin number. If one digit is wrong, I will not get the money. If I continue to get it wrong, I will lose the card. If my number is 6789, 6788 will not be enough; I might just as well have tried to use 1234.
Imagine the reaction if instead of requesting a pin number, the machine was to begin a conversation about why I wanted the money and whether my reason might be too selfish or even immoral.
It is understandable as to why many of us will go to such lengths to find secret ways of both protecting and remembering our pin numbers and other essential passwords. It has become part of our day to day experience but at that point there is a detachment from any question of what we want the money for. Those questions may have been addressed before and afterwards but around the question of ‘getting it right’ there can be a good deal of anxiety.
Translate this to the religious sphere and the implications can become very significant. If we have an internalised superstitious / mechanical experience of faith and if that contains the idea that correct doctrine somehow equates to having a correct password for getting into heaven, then it can easily lead to the way in which moral issues are considered being compromised. One of the reasons for this being the fact that sometimes when we begin to engage with certain issues, questions may begin to form in our minds about whether what we have always thought, or been taught to believe, is in fact correct and whether we should not be prepared to change.
Take a contemporary and, of course, controversial example. The denomination in which I am a minister (the United Reformed Church now ordains LGBT+ ministers and will perform same sex weddings. It has been a long journey to this position and has had to deal with views held by many that the Bible contains clear prohibitions of both these.
When the unconscious belief is strong that taking a different view equates with changing the passwords to heaven to ones that will instead unlock the doors of hell (I know it sounds a bit extreme, perhaps, but this is about something unconscious and deeply imbedded!) The result has been that it was a struggle to listen to the voices of people suffering prejudice, rejection and often violence and deconstruct traditional attitudes in order to be able to be empathic. Gradually, though, that has changed because relationships have developed and prejudices and fears have been dismantled.
When I had the role of being a facilitator of discussions regarding Christian attitudes to homosexuality I would start by relating the experience of using role play to explore attitudes to the abolition of slavery. Groups of students given the task of acting out the debate for and against as if abolition was only just being proposed and using only the Bible as a resource, invariably came to the conclusion that slavery should be retained as God had clearly ordained it!
My hope was that people would recognise that changes in moral stances were not only possible but often needed and that the unconscious drives against change could and should be resisted.
Thinking Aloud 