A sophisticated yet funny story that Niels Bohr liked to tell:
One of our neighbors in Tisvilde once fixed a horseshoe over the door to his house.
When a common friend asked him,
`But are you really superstitious?
Do you honestly believe that this horseshoe will bring you luck?’he replied,
`Of course not;
but they say it works even if you don’t believe in it.’
This reminds me of the fetter of attachment to rites and rituals, which keeps us in Samsara. On a deeper level, anything we wrongly cling to as a means to… ranging from good fortune, to even spiritual liberation, falls in the category of being bound by this fetter. While the ‘horseshoe logic’ seems relatively harmless, so long as one has attachment even to the possible validity of the erroneous means one is still fettered.
Related Article:
Susan Storm’s Attachment to Rites
http://www.moonpointer.com/index.php?itemid=1530