Are there any superstitions that you really believe?

Long answer: No.

I don’t have any beliefs in superstitions per se, but I am always amazed by coincidences in certain situations. This week alone, I’ve had three occasions where I’ve spoken someone’s name out loud (as an example), and then I’ve gotten e-mail from that person within the hour. And this is someone from whom I’ve not heard in years. Seriously, this happens a lot with me.

I have to wear a New York Giants’ t-shirt and cheer loudly for the team during a game to help increase their chances of winning.

I have to play the violin at night to keep unknown monsters from the other dimension at bay.

@bkcunningham Go Giants! Down with GB!!

@ANef_is_Enuf Back in my baseball days I believed in Rally caps. However, there could be a scientific, psychological, effect.. so I’m not entirely sure it’s a myth or a superstition.

I can’t think of any superstitions that I believe, but I bet there are some inculcated in my belief system.

As for the people dying in threes, that is just human beings habit of pattern recognition. Our minds will bend everything until we fulfill it. We even ignore other deaths that occur at the same time. Because actually lots of people die every day.

I don’t really believe any of them, but I like to have fun with some of them.

Like you, I pay attention to the death-in-threes superstition.

If I’m walking with my wife and a black cat passes by, I’ll make a comment.

If it’s a full moon, I’ll wonder aloud how it’s affecting people’s moods.

If someone calls me while I’m in the middle of talking about them, I’ll say, “Wow, your ears must have been ringing”.

…and so on. I actually believe these occurances are just coincidence, but it’s fun to play with them.

Plus, being an agnostic, in the back of my head, I sometimes think, “Well, maybe…”.

I don’t have any superstitions, but if I do see a New York [anything] team or Boston [anything] team bumper sticker or poster – I spit on it for good luck.

lol, @Charles.

As a follow-up to my post above: Yesterday, I gave a presentation to a group of people, and I used the word “inculcated.” This is not a word I use frequently—frankly, I don’t recall the last time I had a reason to use it. And lo, I see Marinelife’s post above contains “inculcated.”

I just ripped through the long list of messages caught by my spam filter. There is a spam message in there from ”[xyz].com.” The ”[xyz]” happens to be name of my cat who died last summer, and I had spoken the cat’s name out loud yesterday (first time in months). And it’s a very unusual name. Again, this stuff happens all the time with me. Freaky!

Don’t eat yellow snow.

I was just swooning at inculcuate, and here it is, used twice.

Don’t feel too cocky about a run of good times or good luck or all-systems working. It will snow the next day and my internet DSL will be down, again. So here I am, waiting for Phil the repair guy for the third time in a month.

(Maybe, however, he will turn out to be Mr. Right.)

I am hesistant about opening an umbrella indoors, hate it when crows fly overhead, I dislike black cats crossing the road (Be careful kitties!), dread walking under ladders and I think I jinx myself and have to touch wood when I am overly optimistic about something. I don’t really believe in all of these things but better safe than sorry.

I don’t really believe in any superstitions. But I do take part in a few (mainly sport-related ones) just for the fun of it.

Mr Fiance has a bunch of Edmonton Oilers jerseys, a few with different players’ names on them. Depending on how the team is doing, he’ll wear a different one, e.g. if they need to toughen up, he wears his Mark Messier jersey. If they need scoring, he’ll wear Gretzky.

Disclaimer: I may have mentioned this one before. Sorry if I’m repeating myself.
I have a pair of socks with goats on them. The goats are wearing three-piece suits, and look quite dapper. For a long time, I called them the Intelligent Goat socks, and wore them on exam days. Then Mr Fiance renamed them “Steve Goatenberg”, and they turned into a general good-luck charm. I don’t wear them anymore – when either of us feels we need luck, we just carry one in our pockets.

I knock on wood when I state something aloud that I hope doesn’t change. If the salt spills, I get nervous if somebody doesn’t throw a pinch over his/her shoulder.

I wouldn’t say I necessarily believe most superstitions, but there are a few that have been so ingrained in me, behavior-wise, that i always do them. Knocking on wood, for example. I always knock on wood or my own head, if no wood is available, but that started out as a way to make my mother laugh uproariously but that’s less of a way to keep evil spirits at bay than it is to acknowledge that just because this bad thing hasn’t happened to me doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen to me. I suppose the one superstition that I really hold any stock in is throwing salt over my left shoulder if some spills. I do this every time salt spills.

I also have a pair of underwear that I wear when I want to get laid. They haven’t failed me yet.

@KatawaGrey Lucky underwear? Interesting. The only sexual superstition I have is holey rubbers. I don’t fuck with them.

I do the same as @Blueroses.

I believe a full moon can actually have an effect on people, and especially on pregnant women approaching their due date. My mom worked in the neonatal unit at the hospital for many years, and she said a full moon seemed to cause a domino effect for births. She and a few other nurses constantly remarked on how many women would be rushed into delivery during a full moon.

I’m silly enough to throw salt over my shoulder if it spills.

If I’m feeling wary when I make a statement and don’t want to “jinx” myself, I knock on wood.

When I cross over railroad tracks, I touch the ceiling of the car. (I heard that or saw that somewhere as a pre-teen, and for whatever reason, it stuck with me.)

Yeah, I’m a superstitious geek, and I’ll go ahead and admit that I used to carry a rabbit’s foot keychain.

I have experiences similar to @picante. Carl Jung referred to it as synchronicity. I do not believe it is anything other than coincidence, but it does happen to me fairly often and sometimes can actually get to be a bit annoying. I have tested the idea by noting something unusual and then waiting for something related to occur. No results to date.

My anthropology of religion professor used to define superstition as “something I don’t believe in”.

@incendiary_dan – Anthropology of religion? Sounds like an interesting course.

In a word, no.

I think that sushi prepared in a restaurant is more likely to be wholesome than if I buy it, take it home, cut it up on my clean cutting board. It makes no sense, so it must be a superstition.

Death in 3’s for me, too @ANef_is_Enuf.

It even happens with my pets.

Not too many other than that one, though.

No, not a superstitious person.

No.

I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Oh, wait. I do throw salt over my shoulder and knock on wood, too. I guess I didn’t think of those, because it is more of a “funny” thing to me, but I do that. Lots of GA’s. :)

I knock on wood and throw salt over my shoulder. I don’t really believe anything bad will happen if I don’t, but I can’t seem to help myself, anyway.

I believe people are weird around a full moon, but I don’t know if the moon causes it, or people use it as an excuse to be weirder than usual. I can say with certainty that Fluther often gets unruly on or around the full moon. It’s a fairly common occurrence for one of the mods to say “Is it a full moon, or what?”, and it actually is.

I also have the synchronicity issues people have mentioned. Coincidence piled on coincidence makes me hear the Twilight Zone music in my head. Again, I don’t believe it’s anything more than coincidence, but it always makes me wonder for a bit.

Oliver’s Woofing Theorem
http://homepages.cae.wisc.edu/~dwilson/rsfc/Woof.html

It is ubiquitous and all powerful. It rules the outcome of every sporting event, and is 100% accurate.

I so badly want to be an atheist regarding the woofing gods, but I’m afraid.

Breaking a mirror gives you 7 years bad luck. But I earned over 100 years of bad luck by age 25 by breaking mirrors, so I stopped worrying about it. I don’t think I’ve had particularly bad luck. In fact, I’d say I was pretty lucky.

@bkcunningham As well you should be. You ignore the woofing gods at your team’s peril. I am sure that there is a corollary that if you willfully deny the woofing gods’ existence then your woofs will be doubly powerful.