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English 1a

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The Significance of Superstition Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I shall die before I wake. I pray the Lord my soul to take. As a young child this is the prayer I would pray every night before I went to bed. I can remember my mother kneeled down beside me as we recited this prayer together like a fine tuned duet. This is how I received my first indoctrination into the concept of God and religion. I will share my religious journey from a pre-teen youth, into my twenties, and to the present day. This journey consists of my religious enlightment through animism, superstition, and taboo.
My religious travels have taken me from a young Christian boy, to an Islamic convert, to a man who sees the richness and beauty in those who hold religious and non-religious beliefs. As a youth, I could not grasp the understanding of the spiritual world. What was the difference between ghost, spirits, demons, and other beings that were invisible to me? I didn’t have an answer for that particular question. My mom always told me to live my life as if God was watching me. Marvin Harris speaks of this spiritual world when he talks about animism. “The basis of all that is distinctly religious in human thought is animism, the belief that humans share the world with a population of extraordinary, extracorporeal, and mostly invisible beings, ranging from souls and ghosts to saints and fairies, angels and cherubim, demons, jinni, devils and gods.” (Harris 17). Harris goes on to explain that religion sprouts from when people start to believe in one or more of these invisible beings. Animism by definition is the belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe. This power of the unseen is so powerful that people live their lives in fear of receiving some kind of punishment are retribution. I lived my younger years

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