I spent years in hospital emergency rooms as an x-ray technician and the staff, along with the ambulance crews and police, always made jokes about this imagined lunar effect. On particularly crazy nights we would all ask, “WTF? Must be a full moon…” So someone would check - the answer was always, “Nope.” Then on particularly slow and uneventful nights someone would notice that it was a full moon. And this went on for years.
People who believe this sort of thing are usually prone to believing in other nonsense like sky gods, astrology, karma, reincarnation, or some other necrodestinational reward or punishment. It has to do with unchecked cognitive habituation as a young adult. You get hooked early on “Gateway” beliefs in Santa, The Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, which lead eventually to harder stuff like beliefs in sky gods, afterlives, astrology, karma, etc. And then before you know it your intellectual sloth lands you somewhere between a common religious slave and a new age Deepakian junkie - in either case you are epistemologically crippled by a head full of superstition-based mystically subjectivist metaphysical mush. And here is the type of faulty analogy that is commonly made:
A: The moon turns the tides
B: Our bodies are at about average 60 percent water
C: The moon effects our behavior…
But, of course, this is like saying,
A: All birds have wings
B: Birds use wings to fly
C: All birds can fly…
It is frustrating to see superstition-based beliefs, especially beliefs in sky gods, afterlives, karma, astrology, etc., flourishing even now in the 21st century when we know the whole mess could be cleaned up in a generation or two if we simply gave honest answers to every child.
