Hinduism, at least the modern version, is often called democratic contrasting with the popular Abrahamic religions, whose monotheistic and scriptures based aspects are well known. The nature of the Hindu religion letting people practice any rituals, have faith in any godmen etc is often cited to support the previous statement. Yet, there are many practices of many Hindus that are derided as superstitious by other Hindus. (I use Hindu broadly, and include both nominal and practicing ones.) Even such widespread practices as believing that a priest gets possessed by god and god answers queries through him is considered superstitious and dismissed with disdain. Somehow this looks paradoxical.
To an outsider, or a non practicing Hindu rationalist leaning towards agnosticism or atheism, Hindus worshiping half human half animal entities is no more superstitious than (or as superstitious as) Hindus seeing omen in such things as black cat crossing path, single sneeze, broken mirrors and bangles etc.
That makes me postulate that those activities that don't find any mention in any of the vast corpus of scriptures are considered superstitious. Is this correct? Or does Hinduism actually define superstition in such a way that mainstream practices are excluded?
A related question: Is believing that thunder is due to Indra, rain due to Varuna etc considered superstitious, religious, or amusing and foolishness. I ask this because modern Hinduism is far removed from its Vedic roots when it comes to considering who are gods and which gods can be worshiped.