What if you worship the god of critical thinking and pray by thinking critically?
In Judaism, Satan is basically a lawyer guy that Elohim hires to question him and call him on his bullshit. That may explain why Jewish people place a lot of importance on having a nice argument.
The ancient Greek philosphers were also very fond of critical thinking and they were religious. The Athenians revered Athena especially, the goddess of wisdom. So it was considered virtuous to spend your days in thought and debate.
Like, I get that your experience is with Christianity, which is not a very thought-heavy religion. But I find it difficult to believe that you’ve studied a representative sample of the world’s religions. I think you’re just repeating a trope you read online, that religious people are stupid, without thinking critically about it.
I came up with an idea of a deity, The Forbidden God, who hates worship. You worship them and they smite you. It/he/she values critical thinking and logic. You don’t have to be right, but blind faith and grovelling, smite. I’ve yet to incorporate them into some kind of short story. One day.
Magic is the technology we use to change our minds and perceptions with our thoughts. For example, the placebo effect. The mere thought that you’ve taken medicine can cause a psychosomatic healing effect. I’m a chaos magician, which means I believe in using psychology to take magic a step further than mere placebos.
Magic is powered by belief. Your classic medical placebos are powered by your belief in medicine. Studies show that placebos work even if you know they’re placebos. I call that faith. You know, choosing to believe, and the belief having an observable effect. Faith is a form of belief powered by will. And you can will yourself into all kinds of things, which is pretty cool. You don’t even need the placebo effect if you’re strong enough to will yourself to get better.
But that’s exhausting, and not everyone has that much faith in themself. We can actually multiply the effect of faith to get a bigger result, using belief structures. You know, like medicine. We choose to believe in medicine, take a sugar pill, and believe the medicine will heal us. It’s more efficient, takes less will to get more healing.
And religions are useful because they can provide large scale systems of belief to multiply the power of our faith. I mean, there’s also the way they can influence society through memes, but let’s focus on magic. Religions make magic stronger.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen mortals pray to gods, and the idea of their god gives them strength, multiples the effect of their faith. Because human beings are a social species, and aren’t really designed to do anything alone, including magic. With a coven or a laborator or an atelier or a cult or a relationship with a god, magic gets stronger. Minds get stronger and can do more.
Critical thinking helps you with truth, and truth is great. But truth isn’t everything. Knowing the solution to a problem and doing it are too different things. Religious magic can help people do what critical thinking says is the right solution to their problems. That’s religion and critical thinking working together.
Our experience of reality is not the same thing as reality itself, it is our brain’s interpretation of internal and external stimuli based on our prior experiences of those stimuli. In addition, our brains really hate when our perception doesn’t line up with our expectations, which causes the feeling known as cognitive dissonance.
So, our brain expects a certain outcome and begins to produce the chemical responses (the internal stimuli) to have its perception of reality match its expectation of the external stimuli to avoid cognitive dissonance.
This is an incredibly oversimplified parsing of what’s happening but it’s the gist of it.
Yeah! Magic is plenty easy to scientifically study. It’s just a category of technology that’s made out of ideas instead of physical things. You’ve got your mechanical engineers, your electrical engineers, and your magical engineers. Nothing special about it, except how our current culture mystifies it so much.
I blame Christianity for trying to stunt progress on magical science. You know, they failed to keep Galileo from overturning their belief system, but they succeeded in putting down any mages not sanctioned by them. You know they try to monopolise magic so you have to go to them for magical assistance. It’s fucked up.
If your definition of “god” is something you revere, then sure, go have some gods. Have a bunch. It’s great to value things like knowledge and thought and kindness.
If your definition of god includes some supernatural power, then I’ll need some evidence.
In philosophy, the word “nature” is usually used to mean “the universe”, or “all of existence”. Within a mainstream western framework, “the supernatural doesn’t exist” is thus circular reasoning; a tautology. We can translate it as “Things from beyond existence don’t exist”. Yeah, duh! It’s an unfalsifiable claim, and Karl Popper would be ashamed of it.
Magic isn’t supernatural, because magic is part of nature. It exists. Nobody will ever be able to prove that the supernatural exists, because it’s oxymoronic. But proving that magic exists? Easy, with a robust and falsifiable definition of magic.
Magic, by definition, has to be supernatural. Otherwise it’s just physics. What we call magic is just things we haven’t figured out in enough detail to explain. Or things we’ve made up and aren’t real. The latter is the supernatural bit.
" God of the gaps" and all that.
I will happily change my mind if you can show me how that’s wrong. Though I would first ask that you give an example of what magic is.
My favourite example of magic is money. See, I define magic as “observable phenomena caused by things that aren’t real”. Now obviously the value of money is a construct imbued with illusory realness by society. But if we’re talking about genuine realness, the value of money is obviously not real. Thus, money is constructed by society as mundane, but if we call bullshit on capitalism, then our perspective changes and money is magic.
You appear to be defining magic as “unexplained phenomena, incompatible with science”. Under this definition, a Wizard casting a fireball spell in the Forgotten Realms isn’t magic, because it’s perfectly explained by science; magic in Dungeons and Dragons is caused by manipulating the Weave, which is a field that projects reality. I think that’s absurd.
And if a fraud psychic who posts on tiktok used your definition, then they would say psychic powers aren’t magic, because they claim to have a perfectly logical and scientific explanation for their psychic powers. It’s bullshit, but the point is that they’re claiming it’s not bullshit, and your definition of magic basically boils down to “bullshit”.
So while your definition is useful for communicating with other nonbelievers (Myself among them in this case), it’s not useful for communicating with believers in psychic powers, and it’s fundamentally illogical. Because it’s circular reasoning. Your conclusion is in your definition. It’s just like you said: if it were true, it would be physics. Believers claim it is physics. There’s a fundamental disconnect.
What if you worship the god of critical thinking and pray by thinking critically?
In Judaism, Satan is basically a lawyer guy that Elohim hires to question him and call him on his bullshit. That may explain why Jewish people place a lot of importance on having a nice argument.
The ancient Greek philosphers were also very fond of critical thinking and they were religious. The Athenians revered Athena especially, the goddess of wisdom. So it was considered virtuous to spend your days in thought and debate.
Like, I get that your experience is with Christianity, which is not a very thought-heavy religion. But I find it difficult to believe that you’ve studied a representative sample of the world’s religions. I think you’re just repeating a trope you read online, that religious people are stupid, without thinking critically about it.
I came up with an idea of a deity, The Forbidden God, who hates worship. You worship them and they smite you. It/he/she values critical thinking and logic. You don’t have to be right, but blind faith and grovelling, smite. I’ve yet to incorporate them into some kind of short story. One day.
Because as soon as you start thinking critically you don’t need gods.
“Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millennia ago. They were… more trouble than they were worth.”
Okay, let’s talk about magic.
Magic is the technology we use to change our minds and perceptions with our thoughts. For example, the placebo effect. The mere thought that you’ve taken medicine can cause a psychosomatic healing effect. I’m a chaos magician, which means I believe in using psychology to take magic a step further than mere placebos.
Magic is powered by belief. Your classic medical placebos are powered by your belief in medicine. Studies show that placebos work even if you know they’re placebos. I call that faith. You know, choosing to believe, and the belief having an observable effect. Faith is a form of belief powered by will. And you can will yourself into all kinds of things, which is pretty cool. You don’t even need the placebo effect if you’re strong enough to will yourself to get better.
But that’s exhausting, and not everyone has that much faith in themself. We can actually multiply the effect of faith to get a bigger result, using belief structures. You know, like medicine. We choose to believe in medicine, take a sugar pill, and believe the medicine will heal us. It’s more efficient, takes less will to get more healing.
And religions are useful because they can provide large scale systems of belief to multiply the power of our faith. I mean, there’s also the way they can influence society through memes, but let’s focus on magic. Religions make magic stronger.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen mortals pray to gods, and the idea of their god gives them strength, multiples the effect of their faith. Because human beings are a social species, and aren’t really designed to do anything alone, including magic. With a coven or a laborator or an atelier or a cult or a relationship with a god, magic gets stronger. Minds get stronger and can do more.
Critical thinking helps you with truth, and truth is great. But truth isn’t everything. Knowing the solution to a problem and doing it are too different things. Religious magic can help people do what critical thinking says is the right solution to their problems. That’s religion and critical thinking working together.
Crazy take. The placebo effect isn’t magic. Science doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t make it magic.
Science absolutely understands the placebo effect though.
News to me! I didn’t think we knew why it has any real effect on the body. I guess I’ll do some looking.
Put in simple terms:
Our experience of reality is not the same thing as reality itself, it is our brain’s interpretation of internal and external stimuli based on our prior experiences of those stimuli. In addition, our brains really hate when our perception doesn’t line up with our expectations, which causes the feeling known as cognitive dissonance.
So, our brain expects a certain outcome and begins to produce the chemical responses (the internal stimuli) to have its perception of reality match its expectation of the external stimuli to avoid cognitive dissonance.
This is an incredibly oversimplified parsing of what’s happening but it’s the gist of it.
Yeah! Magic is plenty easy to scientifically study. It’s just a category of technology that’s made out of ideas instead of physical things. You’ve got your mechanical engineers, your electrical engineers, and your magical engineers. Nothing special about it, except how our current culture mystifies it so much.
I blame Christianity for trying to stunt progress on magical science. You know, they failed to keep Galileo from overturning their belief system, but they succeeded in putting down any mages not sanctioned by them. You know they try to monopolise magic so you have to go to them for magical assistance. It’s fucked up.
I’m not on your side about the magic nonsense. I agree with the other user, I just disagree that science doesn’t understand the placebo effect.
Still not magic. Magic is bullshit
The placebo effect isn’t even real.
If your definition of “god” is something you revere, then sure, go have some gods. Have a bunch. It’s great to value things like knowledge and thought and kindness.
If your definition of god includes some supernatural power, then I’ll need some evidence.
In philosophy, the word “nature” is usually used to mean “the universe”, or “all of existence”. Within a mainstream western framework, “the supernatural doesn’t exist” is thus circular reasoning; a tautology. We can translate it as “Things from beyond existence don’t exist”. Yeah, duh! It’s an unfalsifiable claim, and Karl Popper would be ashamed of it.
Magic isn’t supernatural, because magic is part of nature. It exists. Nobody will ever be able to prove that the supernatural exists, because it’s oxymoronic. But proving that magic exists? Easy, with a robust and falsifiable definition of magic.
Magic, by definition, has to be supernatural. Otherwise it’s just physics. What we call magic is just things we haven’t figured out in enough detail to explain. Or things we’ve made up and aren’t real. The latter is the supernatural bit.
" God of the gaps" and all that.
I will happily change my mind if you can show me how that’s wrong. Though I would first ask that you give an example of what magic is.
My favourite example of magic is money. See, I define magic as “observable phenomena caused by things that aren’t real”. Now obviously the value of money is a construct imbued with illusory realness by society. But if we’re talking about genuine realness, the value of money is obviously not real. Thus, money is constructed by society as mundane, but if we call bullshit on capitalism, then our perspective changes and money is magic.
You appear to be defining magic as “unexplained phenomena, incompatible with science”. Under this definition, a Wizard casting a fireball spell in the Forgotten Realms isn’t magic, because it’s perfectly explained by science; magic in Dungeons and Dragons is caused by manipulating the Weave, which is a field that projects reality. I think that’s absurd.
And if a fraud psychic who posts on tiktok used your definition, then they would say psychic powers aren’t magic, because they claim to have a perfectly logical and scientific explanation for their psychic powers. It’s bullshit, but the point is that they’re claiming it’s not bullshit, and your definition of magic basically boils down to “bullshit”.
So while your definition is useful for communicating with other nonbelievers (Myself among them in this case), it’s not useful for communicating with believers in psychic powers, and it’s fundamentally illogical. Because it’s circular reasoning. Your conclusion is in your definition. It’s just like you said: if it were true, it would be physics. Believers claim it is physics. There’s a fundamental disconnect.