Christmas irony

Comments (13)

1. <> He doesn’t get it, does he?
   “You’re superstitious. I’m religious”.

   I assume Ambrose Bierce did something clever juxtaposing that pair of words.

   1. I think there’s a fairly robust distinction between the two – at least by colloquial definitions — such that one can claim to be religious but not superstitious. As I understand the terms, superstitions usually involve some kind of power over natural forces, quasi-scientific laws of natural causation, and self-help. Compared with religions, they usually lack an overarching world picture/outlook and do not necessarily involve supernatural beings or a supernatural “realm”.

      1. I’m sorry, but religions claim power over disease and circumstance, the ability to propitiate deities to attain outcomes, and enlightenment by magical techniques. For my money, they make all the right noises to be superstitions. It’s also suspicious that it seems all other religions are superstitions, but not ours…

      2. In other words, when you deliberately and selectively define the term so as to include all religious claims, ignoring all other definitions, suddenly it’s ironic for someone religious to criticize superstition. Crazily ironic, that.

      3. How dare I take religions at their word and behaviour, and ignore the rarefied definitions of philosophers of religion and apologists! Damn me!

         I have given my definition of religion here.

      4. There is no ‘rarefied definition of philosophers of religion and apologists’ involved; contrary to your suggestion, it’s obviously possible for a word to have many meanings without all the alternate meanings being technical or in a special sense, and ‘superstition’ is obviously one of those terms. It clearly has quite a few different meanings, in fact; as a term of disparagement it is applied by people of widely different viewpoints in widely different ways. It’s simply silly to suggest that the Archbishop meant it in exactly the same sense as someone who would include religious claims in the mix, and just somehow didn’t know it. The ‘irony’ here is purely artificial — you have created it by deliberately shifting the meaning of the term from one of its possible colloquial uses, and in both your comments it is clear that you are the one (deliberately!) using a specialized sense of the term, not the Archbishop. Such arbitrary shifts in meaning are good for light jokes; but there’s no ‘irony’ here except in the sense that someone can deliberately shift a term of value or disvalue to make it include more or fewer things. It’s no more really ‘ironic’ than if an atheist were to claim it’s ironic that an agnostic appeals to reason, given that reason leads one to be an atheist; such things are merely obvious games of words, ways of arbitrarily redefining terms in order to rig everything in one’s favor.

      5. Superstition: • noun 1 excessively credulous belief in the supernatural. 2 a widely held but irrational belief in supernatural influences, especially as bringing good or bad luck.
         Compact OED

         I would have thought that the above is a pretty good definition of religion but what do I know!

2. I would say that the title “archbishop” clearly shows that superstition can satisfy the longings of the human heart. Such an office couldn’t exist at all if it didn’t.

3. Deeply cheesy punchline at the end.

   It’s certainly on par with the joke I got in my Christmas cracker the other day.

4. I have a deeply held belief, a superstition you might say, that chocolate is The. Best. Thing. Ever. If I don’t eat it every day, something bad might happen. Prove me wrong.

   1. That’s neither a belief nor a superstition, it’s a fact of life 😉

      1. Indeed, it is easily provable that if you don’t eat chocolate every day, something bad will happen: you’ll have had no chocolate that day.

         What could be worse than that?

5. John — this is no more than academic now, but for the second time I stumbled upon the “rarefied” definition that triggered my first comment. It’s from A Dictionary of Superstitions by Lasne and Gaultier, p. viii:

   In effect, the primary territory of superstition proves to be magico-religious, a space in human thought where the criterion of truth and error remains indefinite and fluctuating. But for all that, religions are not conceived as superstitions; they constitute a coherent, controlled system explaining the world. Whereas religion defines itself as a belief and tries to establish itself, superstition affirms its own truth, but does not seek to justify itself: it is as good as its effectiveness […] as T. S. Knowlson described it: “The true origin of superstition is to be found in early man’s effort to explain Nature and his own existence; in the desire to propitiate Fate and invite Fortune; in the wish to avoid evils he could not understand …”

   That seems to match up with my intuitive “folk” understanding of the term.

   Anyway …

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