Breitbart knew instinctively, as people in Washington and most other places did not, that movies, television programs, and popular music send out deeply political messages every hour of every day. They shape the culture, and then the culture shapes politics. Influence those films and TV shows and songs, and you’ll eventually influence politics.
The Left had known that for generations, but on the Right, so many people in politics thought only about politics. To Breitbart, that was folly.
Here:
Perhaps you have heard of taqiyya, the Muslim doctrine that allows lying in certain circumstances, primarily when Muslim minorities live under infidel authority. Now meet tawriya, a doctrine that allows lying in virtually all circumstances—including to fellow Muslims and by swearing to Allah—provided the liar is creative enough to articulate his deceit in a way that is true to him.
[. . .]
As a doctrine, "double-entendre" best describes tawriya's function. According to past and present Muslim scholars (several documented below), tawriya is when a speaker says something that means one thing to the listener, though the speaker means something else, and his words technically support this alternate meaning.
For example, if someone declares "I don't have a penny in my pocket," most listeners will assume the speaker has no money on him—though he might have dollar bills, just literally no pennies. Likewise, say a friend asks you, "Do you know where Mike is?" You do, but prefer not to divulge. So you say "No, I don't know"—but you keep in mind another Mike, whose whereabouts you really do not know.
If you agree that infanticide is morally wrong, should you not also agree that late-term abortion is also morally wrong? Consider this argument:
Infanticide is morally wrong
There is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion
Therefore
Late-term abortion is morally wrong.
To cast it in a slogan: Late-term abortion is pre-natal infanticide!
But of course the argument can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety:
Late-term abortion is not morally wrong
There is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion
Therefore
Infanticide is not morally wrong.
To make a slogan of it: Infanticide is post-natal abortion!
Since the arguments and slogans 'cancel each other out,' the question arises whether we can move beyond a stand-off. The pro-lifer finds it evident that infanticide is morally wrong, violating as it does the infant's right to life, and extends that right to the late-term fetus, while the type of pro-choicer I will be discussing in this post finds it evident that late-term abortion is morally acceptable and extends that moral acceptability to infanticide.
My response to the problem makes appeal to two principles, the Potentiality Principle, and the Modified Species Principle. After I lay them out I will ask whether they help us avoid a stalemate.
The idea behind the Potentiality Principle (PP) is that potential descriptive personhood confers a right to life. In other words, the idea is that potential descriptive personhood entails normative personhood. For present purposes we may define a person in the descriptive sense of the term, a descriptive person, as anything that is sentient, rational, self-aware, and purposive. A person in the normative sense of the term, a normative person, we may define as a rights-possessor. We assume that actual descriptive persons are normative persons and thus have rights, including a right to life, a right not to be killed. Presumably we all accept the following Rights Principle:
RP: All descriptive persons have a right to life.
What PP does is simply extend the right to life to potential persons. Thus,
PP. All potential descriptive persons have a right to life.
I have undertaken the defense of PP in other posts and I won't repeat myself here. PP allows us to mount a very powerful argument, the Potentiality Argument (PA), against the moral acceptability of abortion. Given PP, and the fact that human fetuses are potential persons, it follows that they have a right to life. From the right to life follows the right not to be killed, except perhaps in some extreme circumstances.
It may be that the right to life has multiple sources. Perhaps it has a dual source: in PP but also in the Species Principle (SP) according to which whatever is genetically human has the right to life just in virtue of being genetically human. Equivalently, what SP says is that every member of the species homo sapiens, qua member, has the right to life of any member, and therefore every member falls within the purview of the prohibition against homicide.
The intuition behind SP is that killing innocent human beings is just plain wrong whether or not they are actual persons in the descriptive sense of the term. Now late-term human fetuses are of course human beings, indeed human individuals (not just clumps of cells or bits of human genetic material). And of course they are innocent human beings. it follows that they have a right to life.
Subscription to SP entails that a severely damaged infant, a Down's Syndrome baby, for example, would have a right to life just in virtue of being genetically human regardless of its potential for development. Some will object that SP is involved in species chauvinism or 'speciesism,' the abitrary and therefore illicit privileging of the species one happens to belong to over other species. The objection might proceed along the following lines. "It is easy to conceive of an extraterrestrial possessing all of the capacities (for self-awareness, moral choice, rationality, etc.) that we regard in ourselves as constituting descriptive personhood. Surely we would not want to exclude them from the prohibition against killing the innocent just because they are not made of human genetic material." To deal with this objection, a Modified Species Principle could be adopted:
MSP: Every member of an intelligent species, just insofar as it is a member of that species, has a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.
The two principles (PP and MSP) working in tandem would seem to explain most of our moral intuitions in this matter. And now it occurs to me that PP and MSP can be wedded in one comprehensive principle, which we can call the Species Potentiality Principle:
SPP: Every member of any biological species whose normal members are actual or potential descriptive persons, just insofar as it is a member of that species, possesses a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.
Does the above help us move beyond a stand-off? Not at all. No committed pro-choicer will accept the principles I have articulated above. And of course I won't accept his rejection of them. For they are eminently rationally defensible and free of any formal or informal logical fallacy. And of course no empirical facts speak against them. Here as elsewhere, reason and argument can only take one so far. They are wonderfully useful in achieving clarity about what one's position is and the reasons one has for occupying it. But no argument will convince anyone who doesn't accept one's premises.
Here as elsewhere reason is powerless to decide the question even when informed by all relevant empirical facts.
In the end it comes down to basic moral intuitions. Some people have moral sense and some people don't. I say: Can't you just SEE (i.e., morally intuit) that killing an innocent human being is morally wrong? If you say 'no,' then I call you morally obtuse or morally blind. I throw you in with the color-blind and the tone-deaf. And then I go on to call into question your motives for holding your morally outrageous view. I might say: "The real reason (i.e., the psychologically salient motive) for your support of abortion and infanticide is your desire to have unrestrained sexual intercourse without accepting any responsibility for the consequences of your actions. At the root of it all is your refusal to practice self-restraint, and your selfish desire to do whatever you please." But even in the cases where such a psychological explanation is true it will do nothing to convince the opponent.
Here is something to think about. Would the abortion/infanticide question be such a hot-button issue if it weren't for our innate concupiscence kept constantly aflame by a sex-saturated society? (Pardon the mixed metaphors.) Could it be that concupiscence unrestrained clouds our moral vision and makes us unable to discern moral truths?
This post was 'inspired' by After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live? (A tip of the hat to the noble Maverickians who brought it to my attention.)
The title leaves something to be desired as regards felicity of expression. 'Afterbirth' is either the process whereby the placenta is expelled from the uterus after the neonate has exited, or else the placenta itself. May I suggest 'post-natal'? And to call infanticide after-birth or post-natal abortion is an egregious misuse of language inasmuch as abortion in this context is the termination of a pregnancy by killing of the fetus. Infanticide is not the termination of a pregnancy. One cannot terminate a process that has come to fruition.
We plan our journeys long and short. We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance. And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care. Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?
"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence. One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"
Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know? Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?
He was one serious man. I have always had contempt for unserious people, unserious people in philosophy being the very worst. You know the type: the bland and blasé whose civility is not born of wisdom and detachment but is a mere urbanity sired by a jocose superficiality. I have always had the sense that something is stake in life, that it matters what we believe and how we live. What exactly is at stake, why our lives matter, and how best to respond to nihilists and Nietzsche's Last Men are profoundly baffling problems. But that life is serious is a given.
Perhaps unfortunately, Wittgenstein seemed unable to 'punch the clock' and play the regular guy among regular guys for even a short time. Wittgenstein died in the house of Dr and Mrs Bevan, a house that bore the auspicious name, 'Storeys End.' Ray Monk relates the following anecdote:
Before Wittgenstein moved into their house, Dr Bevan had invited him for supper to introduce him to his wife. She had been warned that Wittgenstein was not one for small talk and that she should be careful not to say anything thoughtless. Playing it safe, she remained silent throughout the evening. But when Wittgenstein mentioned his visit to Ithaca, she chipped in cheerfully, 'How lucky for you to go to America!' She realized at once that she had said the the wrong thing. Wittgenstein fixed her with an intent stare: 'What do you mean, lucky?' (Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 576.)
Poor Mrs Bevan! The first shot depicts LW in 1925, the second on his death bed in 1951.
He apologized for the unintentional burning of some copies of the Koran. Unbelievable and disgusting. If we can't dump this incompetent come November, it may be all over for this great nation. 2012 is indeed a watershed election year.
Wise up, conservatives. Don't hang back because Romney is not a true conservative. He isn't, of course: he's a wishy-washy, flip-flopping pretty boy. He's going to get shot up like hell in the crossfire from the Tea Party and the Occupy-X malcontents. But he's electable and better than Obama. He's the best we got.
Politics is a practical business. It is always about the lesser of evils, except when it is about the least of evils. It is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.
Each of the Republican contenders has drawbacks. But any of them would be better than Obama. Even Ron Paul.
Never forget: Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (Voltaire) "The better is the enemy of the good." The thought is perhaps better captured by "The best is the enemy of the good." In an imperfect world it is folly to predicate action upon perfection. Will you hold out for the perfect spouse? Then you will remain alone. And if you yourself are less than perfect, how can you demand perfection in others?
Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain.
To expect perfection in this fallen world is to succumb to the sort of pernicious utopianism that characterizes leftists.
So that's what that annoying girl-talk mannerism is called:
But the idea that vocal fads initiated by young women eventually make their way into the general vernacular is well established. Witness, for example, the spread of uptalk, or “high-rising terminal.”
Starting in America with the Valley Girls of the 1980s (after immigrating from Australia, evidently), uptalk became common among young women across the country by the 1990s.
Talk like that, and you are, like, a bonehead?
John Hick maintains that
. . . in this post-Enlightenment age of doubt we have realised that
the universe is religiously ambiguous. It evokes and sustains
non-religious as well as religious responses. (An Interpretation of
Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Yale University
Press, 1989, p. 74)
Hick identifies non-religious with naturalistic and religious with theistic responses. I would argue that this identification is mistaken since a religious response to the universe need not be theistic (as witness Buddhism), and a naturalistic response to the universe can be religious (as witness Spinozism). This quibble aside, it is true that theism is a religious response to the universe, and that most contemporary naturalisms are non-religious responses to it. To simplify the discussion, then, we may identify a religious response with a theistic response and a non-religious response with a naturalistic response.
Hick's religious ambiguity thesis thus boils down to the claim that the universe allows, permits, sustains both a theistic interpretation and a naturalistic interpretation. Hick's case for the thesis involves"showing the inconclusiveness of the various philosophical arguments on both sides." (75) Hick tries to do this by surveying a number of theistic and naturalistic arguments.
But this suggests a question. Is the universe intrinsically such as to permit both theistic and naturalistic responses? Is religious ambiguity an intrinsic property of the universe? Or is it a relational property, a property it has only relative to beings who conceptualize it in different ways?
As the opening quotation suggests, Hick intends his thesis to be an avowal of the intrinsic religious ambiguity of the universe: it is the nature of the universe as it is in itself to allow or permit mutually exclusive interpretations. He says confidently that we have "realised" that the "the universe" is religiously ambiguous. But this thesis of intrinsic religious ambiguity is not supported by his argument. At the most, all his argument shows is that arguments on both sides of the issue are inconclusive, and thus that the universe is religiously ambiguous for us. It does not show that the universe is religiously ambiguous in itself.
Indeed, it is difficult to understand what the latter could mean. How could the universe in itself be neither such that it was created by God, nor such that it was not created by God? In itself, the universe cannot be religiously or metaphysically ambiguous. The ambiguity is on our side, residing in our incapacity to arrive at a rationally compelling view one way or the other.
In this predicament we must decide what we are to believe and how we are to act. A leap of faith is required. But whether one's faith is naturalistic or religious, it affirms something about the universe in itself. As far as I can see, Hick has not made a compelling case for his claim that the universe in itself is religiously ambiguous.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), P. 72:
Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.
Although Winch's translation is correct, I would translate ganz verschieden as 'entirely different.' For in American English at least, 'quite' can mean either 'very' or 'entirely.' Glaube (faith) and Aberglaube (superstition) are, says Wittgenstein, entirely different. I agree. It follows that religion cannot be a species of superstition. It is not as if the genus superstition divides into religious and nonreligious species. And as Aberglaube suggests, superstition is a degenerate form of faith, which is what I have been maintaining.
But is it true that superstition arises from fear while religious faith does not arise from fear but is a kind of trust? I don't think so. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10) A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith. So arising out of fear cannot be what distinguishes religious faith from superstition. It is worth noting that Wittgenstein himself believed and feared that he would be judged by God. He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs. In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,
God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (CV, p. 87)
Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.
Perhaps we could say that superstition arises from mundane fear, fear concerning the body and the things of the body, while religious faith does not arise from such fear, but from fear concerning the soul and its welfare. But this is not what Wittgenstein says. Religious faith is a trusting.
A trusting in God, but to do what? Presumably not to supply us with the material necessities of life or to save us physically from life's trials and tribulations. Perhaps one can makes sense of Wittgenstein's notion of trust in terms of his early experience of "feeling absolutely safe" recounted in a lecture on ethics from 1929. "I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say, 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.'" (LE 8)
The feeling of being absolutely safe is the mystical sense that deep down, and despite appearances, everything is perfect and that one is ultimately safe and secure. But surely as indigent bodies in a world of bodies we are not safe and secure. So who is the ME that nothing can injure no matter what happens? Me as individual soul? Me as eternal Atman? If I am at bottom an individual soul confronting God my Judge, then the mystical feeling of being absolutely safe is illusory, is it not? How can I be absolutely safe as individual soul if I am to be judged and perhaps found unworthy of entering the divine presence and then either annihilated or sent to hell? If I am at ontological bottom the eternal Atman, then I am absolutely safe and nothing can touch me — but this does not comport well with the notion of God as Judge.
Wittgenstein says that superstition is a sort of false science. That is essentially what I said when I said that a necessary condition of a superstitious belief is that it be or entail erroneous beliefs about the causal structure of the natural order. But I think we are both wrong.
Suppose a soldier is pinned down behind some rocks under withering fire. There is nothing he can do. So he prays. Supposes he prays that his life be spared by divine intervention. There needn't be any "false science" involved here in the way false science is involved in the childish belief that stepping on a sidewalk crack will break your mother's back. And yet the soldier's prayer is superstitious in the way that the prayer, "Thy will be done," is not.
100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School is now at #79. Despite its unrelenting negativity, prospective applicants to graduate programs may find the site useful. I cannot criticize it for being negative since that is its implied purpose: to compile 100 reasons not to go. But there is something whiny and wimpy about it.
Suppose you are paid to spend five years, from age 22 to age 27, studying in depth a subject you love and have aptitude for in the idyllic environs of a college campus. You have been give tuition remission and a stipend on which to live. You really enjoy reading, writing, thinking, and studying more than anything else. You have good sense and avoid the folly of assuming debt in the form of student loans. You live within your very modest means and have the character to resist the siren songs of a society bent on crazy consumption. A little monkishness never hurt anyone. You spend five years enjoying all the perquisites of academic life: a beautiful environment, stimulating people, library privileges, an office, a flexible work schedule, and the like. At age 27 you are granted the Ph. D. But there are few jobs, and you knew that all along. You make a serious attempt at securing a position in your field but fail. So you go on to something else either with or without some further training.
Have you wasted your time? Not by my lights. Hell, you've been paid to do what you love doing! What's to piss and moan about? You have been granted a glorious extension of your relatively carefree collegiate years. Five more years of being a student, sans souci, in some exciting place like Boston. Five more years of contact with age- and class-appropriate members of the opposite sex and thus five more years of opportunity to find a suitable mate. (But if you marry and have kids while a grad student, then you are a fool. Generally speaking, of course.)
Of course, if your goal in life is to pile up as much loot as possible in the shortest possible time, then stay away from (most) graduate programs. But if the life of the mind is your thing, go for it! What's to kvetch about? Are you washed up at 27 or 28 because you couldn't land a tenure-track position? You have until about 40 to make it in America.
For more on this and cognate topics, see my Academia category.
Robert Samuelson comments on Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 and finds some grounds for a measure of optimism. Conclusion:
America's distinctive beliefs and values are fading, says Murray. Maybe. But our history is that the bedrock values — the belief in freedom, faith in the individual, self-reliance, a moralism rooted in religion — endure against all odds. They've survived depressions, waves of immigration, wars and political scandals.
There is such a thing as the American character and, though not immutable, it is durable. In 2011, only 36 percent of Americans believed that "success in life is determined by outside forces," reports the Pew Global Attitudes survey. In France and Germany, the responses were 57 and 72 percent, respectively. America is different, even exceptional, and it is likely to stay that way.
Russell worried about logic. Wittgenstein worried about logic and his sins.
I hazarded the following definition:
Belief B is superstitious =df (i) B is or entails erroneous beliefs about the causal structure of the natural world; (ii) B makes reference to one or more supernatural agents; (iii) B involves a corruption or distortion of a genuine religious belief.
The conditions are supposed to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient. Several people wrote in to question whether conditions (ii) and (iii) are necessary. What about: blowing on dice; avoiding walking under ladders; carrying a rabbit's foot, etc.
First off, these are not beliefs but practices, and I had set myself the narrow task of defining 'superstitious belief.' Second, it is not clear that the people who engage in the aforementioned practices need have any underlying beliefs about the practices or their efficacy. The gambler who blows on his dice before throwing them may simply be mimicking what he saw some other gambler do, a gambler he thought 'cool.' Same goes for a liitle leaguer who crosses himself at the plate just because he saw some big boy do it. Monkey see, money do. The kid may have no idea what the gesture signifies.
But suppose our gambler really does believe that blowing on the dice will enhance their likelihood of coming up the way he wants. Then (ii) and (iii) go unsatisfied. But is the belief in question a counterexample to my definition? Not unless it is a superstitious belief, which is what I deny!
"But doesn't the belief in question satisfy the dictionary definition?" Yes, it does, but so what? I am not trying to give a lexical definition. A lexical definition, or dictionary definition, aims to describe how a word or phrase is actually used at the present time within some linguistic community. But if you think philosophical insight can be had by consulting dictionaries, then you commit what I call the Dictionary Fallacy. People say the damndest things and use and misuse words in all sorts of ways riding roughshod over all sorts of distinctions. When a misuse becomes widely accepted then it goes into the dictionary since dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive.
But it occurred to me that there is a problem with my definition. A belief can be superstitious even if it doesn't involve any erroneous beliefs about nature and her workings. Consider again the plastic dashboard Jesus. Suppose the motorist believes, not that the hunk of plastic has causal powers relevant to the prevention of automotive mishap, but that the divine person represented by the icon will be inclined to intervene in the natural world in prevention of mishap because he is being honored by the motorist. Such a motorist could be a trained physicist who harbors no false beliefs about nature's workings. (Divine intervention needn't involve any violation of natural laws.) I want to say that that too is a case of superstition. If it is, it is not captured by my definition.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Superstition
Howlin' Wolf, I Ain't Superstitious. "Well, I ain't superstitious, but a black cat just crossed my trail."
Elvis Presley, Good Luck Charm
Leon Redbone, When You Wish Upon a Star
Blind Lemon Jefferson, Rabbit Foot Blues, 1926
Screamin' Jay Hawkins, I Put a Spell on You. Don't miss this one!
Albert King, Born Under a Bad Sign
Eagles, Witchy Woman
Santana, Black Magic Woman
Lovin' Spoonful, Do You Believe in Magic?
Marty Robbins, Devil Woman
Mitch Ryder, Devil with the Blue Dress
Elvis Presley, Devil in Disguise
That makes 13! Time to pack it in.
Superstition is a form of pseudo-religion, a degenerate or distorted form of religion. But what exactly is it and how does it differ from genuine religion? Let's start by asking what sorts of item are called superstitious. There are (at least) superstitious beliefs, practices, and people. Perhaps we should say that a person is superstitious if he habitually harbors superstitious beliefs and engages in superstitious practices. Since practices are underpinned by beliefs, perhaps we can make some progress by trying to define 'superstitious belief.'
Go back to my example of the plastic dashboard Jesus icon. The hunk of plastic has both physical and representational properties. But properties of neither sort induce in the hunk any causal powers of the sort that are relevant to the prevention of automotive mishaps. Now if the motorist believes to the contrary, then he is superstitious — this seems to be an exceedingly clear paradigm case of superstition — and part of what makes him superstitious is that he harbors erroneous beliefs about the causal workings of nature. So it seems that part of the definiens of 'superstitious belief' is
1. an erroneous belief about the casual structure of nature.
If (1) is a necessary condition of a belief's being superstitious, then the mere belief that God exists or that unembodied/disembodied souls exist is not superstitious. Obviously, the belief that there are entities transcendent of nature needn't involve any false beliefs about nature. We have to avoid the mistake of identifiying superstitious beliefs with beliefs about the supernatural. That would be on a par with the mistake of thinking that religion just is superstition.
But (1), though necessary, is not sufficient. For not every erroneous belief about nature's workings is a superstitious belief. When I was a young child I got it into my head that my left arm had to be stronger than my right arm because, being right-handed, I used my right arm more and my left arm less with the result that the power of the left arm was preserved while the power of the right arm was reduced. My childish belief was 'logical' in way, but empirically false. Flexing a muscle is not like flexing a piece of metal. The former typically strenghtens, the latter typically weakens. But there was nothing superstitious about my false belief. A second example is the gambler's fallacy which, though sometimes classified as a superstition, is not one by my lights. So it looks as if we need to add a second necessary condition along the lines of
2. That makes reference to a supernatural agent.
Thus in the case of the dashboard Jesus what makes the belief superstitious is not the attribution to a hunk of plastic as a mere hunk of plastic of causal powers it cannot possess; it is the attribution of such powers to a hunk of plastic that is also iconic or representational, the item represented being a supernatural agent. If the icon were melted down into a non-representational blob, then the superstitious motorist would presumably no longer consider it causally efficacious in warding off danger.
But now it appears that our two necessary conditions are not jointly sufficient. I am assuming that superstition is a form, but not the only form, of pseudo-religion. (Idolatry and blasphemy may be other forms.). As a form of pseudo-religion, superstition is a degenerate or corrupt or distorted form of genuine religion. Now suppose our motorist is a member of a Satanic cult and has on his dashboard an icon that represents some demon or maybe the head honcho of demons, old Mephistopheles himself. And suppose our satanist believes that the presence of that icon (made of the molded excrement of a sacrificed cat) will protect him from the dangers of the road. Then both (1) and (2) will be satisfied without the satanist's belief being superstitious. So I add a third necessary condition:
3. and involves a corruption or distortion of a genuine religious belief.
Example. A kid makes the sign of the cross as he steps up to the plate in a baseball game. If the kid believes that the gesture will increase the likelihood of his connecting with the ball, then he has an erroneous belief about natural causation. But that is not enough to make his belief superstitious. Nor is it enough if we add the reference to a supernatural agent. We need to add the third condition. The genuine religious belief being distorted here is the belief that one's spiritual salvation depends on right relation to God, a right relation that can be secured only via the mediation of Jesus Christ. This genuine religious belief may be false but it is not superstitious: it does not involve any erroneous beliefs about the causal structure of nature. The distortion consists in the invocation of Jesus and his self-sacrifice for a paltry mundane self-serving and ego-enhancing purpose having nothing to do with salvation.
This seems to do the trick. My claim is that my three conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a belief's being superstitious. Counterexamples anyone?
