Many people believe in luck, and at nearly any moment you can see them jumping across raging torrents or betting in cascinos. What they believe in is difficult to define. Some, certainly, believe that they have some integral luckily component of their personality. Many, however, try to game the system to their advantage.
For instance, my friend told me about a mother-in-law from China who refused to admit her grandson was both on the fourteenth of the month. Four is an unlucky number because its audio signifier is similar to the audio signifier for death in Chinese. This chance similarity has gone to the root of this quite superstitious culture, and that combined with a prevalent belief in numerology, leads to fears about numbers. How the grandmother copes with this situation is to demand that the child is born, or at least to only celebrate the birth, on the thirteenth, which is a lucky number.
The implications of this are astounding. Somehow the grandmother believes in this ubiquitous force which is luck, but does not grant this power the ability to see through such facile subterfuge. Similarly, in South East Asia the pinky finger which is longer than the last joint on the ring finger indicates a lucky and prosperous person. Many people, missing the advantage of finger length in the race of life, game the system by growing their pinky fingernail longer, as if luck, which is so concerned about the exact length, won’t notice the finger is not actually of lucky length.
I was talking to my religious friend about this and she agreed the superstitions were silly and that luck, even if it did exist, was likely not a system that could be gamed. This was all well and good until I mentioned that prayer is another one of these systems. Presumably, in her system, if she follows the dominant view of god, then god is omniscient and omnipotent. Therefore, whatever god has done, which is theoretically everything, is a deliberate choice. To attempt to call his attention to the event, to attempt to get god to change his mind about something he has done, such as killing millions in a famine or giving your child cancer, has equally astounding implications.
The person who is praying for their child to live, is either presuming that god made a mistake when he made the original decision to kill their child, and needs to be reminded of that so he can change it, or that it was god’s deliberate action, undertaken for whatever desperate and bizarre reasons, and that the parent’s prayer can force god’s hand. This view of god, as a being who can be either reminded of a mistake or coerced or made to respond to begging, is not really the version the person gives lip service to believing in. If god knows what he is doing, then you accept all he has done and there is no reason to pray at all.
My friend says she prays sometimes to thank god. I told her there was no reason to, since he was going to do what he wants anyway, and it presumably is for the best regardless of your personal suffering of the misery of millions, so prayer would surely be redundant. It merely reminds god that he is on the right track, a reminder he surely does not need. Of course that is not why people pray. They are trying to game a system stacked against them, to prevail upon the intransigent and faceless fates to spare them this one time. They are a grandmother desperately hoping that luck is distracted by her blatant lies about the birthdate, the people with long fingernails curling their hands to luck can’t see how long their fingers are, and finally, someone wailing to the indifferent sky in order to call down another fate.
Sadly, this represents all of us more than we’d like to admit. To build your house more solidly than needed is to make a similar appeal, albeit a more tangible one, that the earthquake won’t flatten your house. Even the rationalist must cope with the indifferent sky and the sudden unforeseen calamity, although they reach for tools rather than magic. Both groups differ about the efficacy of their choice, although the importance of design and construction technique are on their surface easier to gauge their effectiveness.
