superstition

Examples of superstition in the following topics:

• Beliefs

  • Religious adherents often distinguish their own religious beliefs from superstition.
  • Both superstition and many traditional religions are non-materialistic, do not see the world as being subject to laws of cause and effect, and presume that there are immaterial forces influencing our lives.
  • Both religion and superstition seek meaning in otherwise random and chaotic events.
  • However, the term "superstition" refers to what the speaker sees as excessive or false religious behavior as opposed to belief or behavior within a proper or accepted religious standard.

• Erasmus

  • Erasmus of Rotterdam was a renowned humanist scholar and theologian who wrote several important texts criticizing the superstition and formalism of the Church while upholding its core spiritual values.
  • One of Erasmus's best-known works is In Praise of Folly, a satirical attack on superstitions and other traditions of European society in general and the western Church in particular, written in 1509.

• Voltaire

  • The phrase refers to abuses of the people by royalty and the clergy that Voltaire saw around him and the superstition and intolerance that the clergy bred within the people.
  • Voltaire's first major philosophical work in his battle against "l'infâme" was The Treatise on Tolerance (1763), in which he calls for tolerance between religions and targets religious fanaticism, especially that of the Jesuits, indicting all superstitions surrounding religions.

• Basic Principles of Operant Conditioning: Skinner

  • It was this development of "superstition" that led Skinner to believe all behavior could be explained as a learned reaction to specific consequences.

• The Gothic Revival

  • Some critics believe there was a kind of nostalgia for an enchanted, less rational world that was linked to the perceived superstitions of medieval Catholicism.