What magical powers does one need, and where do they come from, to yield AUTHORITY over other people?
Not touching wood when you are tempting fate. I always have and I’ve always been fine !
The most dangerous tool is the fear and threat of eternal punishment for being (sinning) human with the delusion that places your personal accountability on a fictitious (saviour) entity. Thereby releasing you from direct relation to your behavior while convincing you that you're favored. No special powers needed to create an authority over them; indoctrinate their guilt as a means of proof.
My wife and her family are brilliant with superstitions. The biggest no-no is new shoes not allowed on the table. Fortunately there is a remedy. Cross your fingers for 10 seconds. I am sure there are many superstions and old wives tales that had a practical application back in the day.
i think you mean wield, don't you?
superstitions are not in and of themselves dangerous. they can be dangerous tools in the hands of those who want to wield power over others. do not be so hard on authority; it is unbridled power that is dangerous. anarchy is dangerous too. we delegate authority and that's a good thing. we often delegate it unwisely, and when we do that, our delegates use that authority as power instead of representation. that's what we need to be against, not the authority itself. meanwhile, superstition is, as i say, just one of many tools such people use to maintain power.
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IMO all superstition is dangerous. Why does having authority require magical powers? There are many kinds of authority. Which type are you talking about?
Probably the one about how having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS.
@TCameron You’ve learned something wonderful about the world today.
Definitely religion. It has the most grip on a human mind.
Heroes and devils. Man has always had these things. A small child looks up to his parents as heroes until that delusion fades or is destroyed. Devils are the same -- only in the negative -- used to promote fear into conformity. Other heroes and devils come into and out of our lives. Sports figures, actors, politicians, musicians, artists and many others. Then there are the fictional characters: look at how super heroes have become a huge draw for most. Man needs something to guide him -- he is not intelligent enough, yet, in becoming his best on his own.
Authority comes from power.
There are 2 to 7 types of power
Power by position
Power by coercion
Power by reverence
Power by reward
Power by information
Power by punishment
Power by friendship
Of the power bases reverence is the weakest and least deserving. However punishment if used exclusively will result in contempt.
So no magic power needed.
I would say the most dangerous belief is the one that an individual is willing to break their morals to maintain. So it varies on the person
These are all ideological positions. Ideology in and of itself is simply "a system of ideas" and such systems can be good or bad (or, usually, a murky mix of the two).
Religion is to my mind clearly the most dangerous as it's based on the failed epistemology of religious faith. Politics, which includes those who lean to authoritarian ideas, at least deals with the real world rather than an imagined one, and we can confine ourselves to trying to make how we deal with that real world more rational and humane and defensible in terms of rationality and humanism.
While I agree that unquestioning submission to authority is behind a lot of our problems, I don't hold that some general principle of authority should not be "believed" or never submitted to. Some authorities can be trusted (to a point sufficient to render them useful) and the whole concept is just another example of division of labor. I have no desire to personally run the federal government so I delegate that to others. Abuses of power are, or should be, guarded against by checks and balances. We have to be ever-vigilant that power does not corrupt, but if all power and authority exists only as a faceless enemy to always be fighting against and never to be trusted or respected, then there is no point to human enterprise beyond a hunter-gatherer society. Are we really trying to make THAT case?
This is why it's important for parents to do a conscientious job with their children. If a child grows up unable to trust its own parents, it's going to have issues with all power structures, even legitimately constituted and well-functioning ones. And while I mean in part that parents should "do no harm", I also mean, they need to be authentic and just, even though flawed. I doubt that most parents put that much thought into parenting, and the result is that we have too many people blindly giving the middle finger to all authority all the time, not because of a particular problem they're trying to solve, but because they just see authority as inherently a bad thing. Societal confidence in government, police, the educational system are at an all-time low; in fact, I'd say they have virtually collapsed. We're headed to very dark times if we can't nurture a system of civil society that we all feel reasonably good about.