Pat Rice in the room---
As my debut blog under the new regime, it was just too obvious to give me Friday 13th. I must assume the Fates decreed that I actually research my subject for a change. Wikipedia gives the dull boring theories as to the origins of the Friday the 13th superstition. One must wonder how the paranoid determined what day it was that Adam bit into his apple since there were no calendars before there were scientists to study the stars, but fear is always marvelously illogical.
Personally, I prefer the tales of clashes between Christian and pagan religions for the origins of the superstition . By Roman times, we at least had a calendar to mess with, and if sex goddesses dominated Friday (Romans worshiped Venus at the end of the week, and when the Norse 
adopted their calendar, the day of the week that is now Friday was named after their goddess of love, Freya), I can just see the pagans celebrating week's end with a good old fashioned drunken roll in the hay in celebration of Venus and Freya and those old priests cursing the day. So Friday already had a bad rep going for it before the 13th came into play.
The 13th part of the superstition has any number of sources, starting with the 13 people at the last supper (Jesus and his twelve apostles with Judas arriving last), the 13 months in the pagan lunar calendar, and the 13 months of the human menstrual cycle—making the number female, mysterious, and thus evil to male-dominated religions. Makes one wonder if we’ve wandered as far from primitive times as we thought.
Anyway, the story that truly fascinates me is about the Knights Templar , which kind of sealed the deal for Friday the 13th. Killing off an entire company of enormously wealthy, powerful, Christian warriors on a single Friday the 13th with such methodical madness is sufficient to give any day a bad name.
I imagine, in the way of human nature, that all these various events, curses, and tales combined and generated coincidences that fueled the fear. I’m sure, if one looks hard enough, there are plenty of disasters related to Fridays and the number 13 (look at the Apollo 13, for instance) to reinforce the superstition. And according to psychologists, the mind can be so strong that people make their own disasters out of their fears--thus, if you believe today is bad, it's gonna be bad, so go back to bed.
It’s rather obvious that the fear of Friday the 13th is a superstition (defined by Wikipedia as “the irrational belief that future events are influenced by specific behaviors, without having a causal relationship.”). But determining the boundaries of superstition is a little tougher. Astrology attempts to predict future events, but does it have a causal relationship? Astrologers would argue that the planets 
have a magnetic or energy affect on events, but scientists would scoff. It may be irrational to believe that by moving red objects and wind chimes and so forth into the proper sectors of your house according to the ancient Chinese belief in the forces of feng shui will produce the positive future effect you hope to achieve, but how do we know for certain that there isn’t a causal relationship if we actually produce that effect?
We can, of course, also carry this into our religious beliefs, since rationally, we cannot prove that any god exists or that the heavens have any effect on our lives. Call me superstitious, but I’m a believer in things I can’t see. I can’t see gravity, but I haven’t fallen off the planet yet. So why can’t I believe in God and astrology and feng shui as well? Or ghosts. And the power of Love. That’s a big one for me, although there are cynics who shrug off Love as a female affectation and the aftereffect of strong sex.
So where do you draw the line at superstition? And how do you justify that line? I’m off to set a little angel in my Fame sector to see if that affects the fate of this blog…