Most of us know it's superstitious to worry about black cats or walking under ladders,

but even faithful Christians can involve victim to superstitions that put their souls in grave jeopardy.

So what are these superstitions and how can we avoid them?

That's what we'll be talking about in today's episode, and to do that, we need to define our terms.

One author says superstitions are,

irrational beliefs that an object, action, or circumstance that is not logically related to a course of events influences its outcome.

All sin is irrational, but not everything that is irrational is sinful.

Some superstitions are just silly beliefs a person needs to think more clearly about so they can be freed from them, which applies to everybody,

not just religious people. According to a 2024 study in the Journal of Individual Differences,

97% of people engage in some kind of superstition. For example, every year, hundreds of millions of

dollars is lost by people afraid to travel or do business on Friday the 13th. What the study found is that many people might say they aren't superstitious,

but they end up sending chain emails or not stepping on cracks just to be safe,

something researchers call half belief in superstition.

Or as Michael Scott put it,

I'm not superstitious, but I'm a little stitious.

One of the reasons Christianity spread so rapidly in the ancient world

was that it offered hope of salvation in the face of superstitious paganism

that made people feel trapped by omens and capricious deities that controlled their fates.

However, Christians are not immune to superstition,

and relying on these practices when God warns us against them is sinful. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says

the sin of superstition happens, quote, when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain

practices otherwise lawful or necessary, to attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs

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