Beliefs - essay

Can there be any belief so absurd as to not be believed by some human being somewhere? I doubt it. I do not have in mind here major religious dogmas. They are too complicated to deal with in a short essay. I mean more down to earth secular and/or parochial religious or magical beliefs. You know, like black cats, breaking mirrors, crossing your fingers, triskaidekaphobia, divining with chicken innards, taro cards, throwing bones, whirling a live chicken around your head, stuff like that. Take this example from Peru, where it is believed if you wear yellow underwear for the new year you will have good fortune as a student and prosperity as a businessman. Or how about this custom from Spain where it is believed you must toss a goat from a church tower and catch it in a tarp to celebrate a local saint's day. Another example from Peru: cat cookery. This ceremony apparently has to do with the belief that as cats have nine lives, eating one will make you live longer. And, as one local explained, stray cats are better as they have more flavor (those Peruvians!). In parts of Thailand it is believed a pregnant woman should walk three times under an elephant to ease delivery. In Belgium there is a custom whereby people drink a glass of water with a live fish in it (I don't know why they do this). In one part of Papua New Guinea you must carefully preserve your children's feces (else harm may come to them). And how about more close-to-home beliefs like throwing a pinch of salt over your left shoulder, walking under a ladder, breaking a mirror, stepping on a crack, friday the thirteenth, etc. In part of Southeast Asia women wear layers of heavy metal rings around their necks to stretch them. Footbinding was common in China. Tribes in Africa grotesquely stretch their lips and/or ear lobes. People scarify their bodies, pierce their ears, noses, navels and nipples. In parts of New Guinea men believe that if they do not participate in homosexual acts they will be unable to properly mature. In other parts of the world people believe if they do engage in homosexual acts they will be eternally damned. On the Arabian Peninsula the breast milk of a pregnant woman is thought to be poisonous. In India cobras and rock pythons have their fangs removed and their mouths tied shut so they will be harmless and hungry enough so they can be forced to drink milk which they ordinarily do not do. For centuries people did not eat tomatoes, believing them to be poisonous. In one part of Spain there is an annual celebration during which the townsfolk throw tons of tomatoes at each other. A few people in the world believe there is no connection between copulation and pregnancy. Some people engaged in cannibalism because they believed they could incorporate the good features of the deceased into themselves. Others cannibalized corpses as an ultimate insult to their enemies. In India cattle are held sacred. In the United States people ride them for prizes and, of course, eat them by the millions of pounds. People walk on red hot coals, sleep on beds of nails, stare at the sun until they go blind, jab skewers through their tongues, hurl themselves off high towers with ropes tied to their ankles, go without food for weeks, blow themselves up and even set themselves on fire, all because of one belief or another. Less extreme, but equally difficult to comprehend, some believe if you stick pins in an effigy of someone harm will come to them - action at a distance. Others believe malevolent acts can be attained by whispering them into hollow coconut shells. I have not even touched upon such things as adolescent circumcision, widow burning, witchcraft, tooth eviscerations, cutting off finger joints, ghosts, fairies, headhunting, brother-sister marriage, and on and on and on. Humans are strange creatures indeed! How can it be that people everywhere are prepared to believe in outrageously irrational beliefs? Time was, of course, when we simply said that we "civilized" people were rational whereas they ("primitives" or "savages") were not. Whereas we believed in science they believed in magic. We were "intelligent" whereas they were "ignorant." How simple it would be if it were so! Alas, it is not so. It has become obvious that beliefs are not always either rational or irrational. They are often simply nonrational - things we come to believe, no matter how farfetched, simply because we were raised in a milieu in which they are widely believed. Cultural prescriptions and proscriptions if you will. I leave you with my all time favorite outrageously nonrational belief: namely, it is possible to reduce human intelligence to a single numerical score, an "intelligence quotient." This is a belief so obviously unintelligent and nonrational it belongs up there with the best (or worst, as the case may be) of all human absurdities. My advice on I.Q.: don't ask, don't tell.