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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Superstition checkup

If you’re crazy enough to switch majors at the outset of your junior year, or feeble minded enough to regurgitate others’ viewpoints while believing them to be your own, you’d not only fit the mold of a good many others on IU’s undergraduate scene. You wouldn’t just share something unexpectedly in common with me (at least occasionally). You might also be ripe for your latest superstition checkup.

A superstition checkup would evaluate how addled your mind and spirit are by the travails and transitions incumbent on every college student and determine how vulnerable you are to parasitic scams, junk science and kooky conspiracy theories. It would be an introspective exercise, of course, but also entirely informal and individualized. It would not need to take place on any regular basis, only when circumstances truly called for it. All it would ask you to do is ask yourself some questions.

“Superstition checkup.” You might snort at this, and perhaps rightly so. But I doubt it because quite a few of my religiously oriented friends have the modesty to acknowledge how their own faith could be taken as little more than superstition. They’re just as aware of the absurdity potentially coloring their beliefs as its legitimacy as I am with my most burgeoning convictions.

One such conviction (although it hasn’t always “burgeoned”) is a belief in reincarnation. I’m more than happy to tell you why a superstition checkup could be necessary – even more necessary than, say, a dental checkup, whose function has been lost upon me because I treat my teeth with decency anyway.

At the start of a new year, I think of myself now and then as the archetypal, idealistic, youthful scholar who cavorts across this sunny campus with books in arms and earnest love of life and learning in my heart. I didn’t see myself as a budding Bertrand Russell, blithely but boldly pondering my own role in and compatibility with society. Nor did I consider myself the reincarnation of some equally influential person.
But there’s a chance I was some kind of gawky, spastic, quirky intellectual. I might have taught physics or philosophy at some far eastern university just a few decades ago. I could’ve emigrated to America after being exiled from Europe in the revolutions of 1848. I could’ve ...

Oh, but you don’t care, do you? It couldn’t possibly spark the most negligible glimmer of interest.

Then that confirms it. You’ve just completed your superstition checkup in advance, and vicariously, too. You didn’t even have to answer those questions I said you would. Having learned through me, however, you’ve helped honor the hyper-idealistic, cyclical, larger-than-life forces of nature I’ve just spent the last 400 words deriding.
Congratulations. Come again soon (to your senses).

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