Belief of Magic, Magik, Majic, Majik?

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I'll echo Monty's answer on that one, on where the information comes and its reliability, and on the idea that if someone is present who is interfering with the oracular process, that will be more difficult. That's not saying such interference makes the process impossible: the diviner simply needs to screen out the interference, rather like a listening to radio traffic through static.

As for the "Christian praying" comment, I have been reading Tarot for about 25 years, as well as reading runes and doing crystal scrying. I've never conclusively seen any of it fail because somebody nearby prayed and took my information source away. I have, however, once or twice managed to do divination despite the presense of someone who was less than comfortable with it—by shielding both myself and the questioner psychically—but I don't like doing that. For one, as since I have Asperger's, the discomfort against which I'm shielding would have to be very strong for it to bother me, so for me a psychic shield is kind of redundant. For another, subjecting people to stuff they don't want in the first place seems to me to be, at the very least, bad etiquette. I believe I could do it even do divination around someone hostile to it if I had to, but seeking out such a situation would be silly. Why would I want essentially to pick a fight?

Lastly, I don't make a big deal out of being able to do divination. You will not find me claiming psychic powers on national television, because I don't consider psychism unusual. If I divine for someone else, I ultimately wouldn't be doing anything for anyone else that they couldn't do for themselves. Divination is a skill and a tool, like any other. I treat it as such.

So you have "new & Improved" history books on what happened. William Shirer was in Germany as the bombs dropped, chronicling events as they happened. He later got access to all the secret government papers and filled in the rest of the details. I tend to trust someone who writes purely because they are a journalist who doesn't have an axe to grind.

Also, people who look at history from a distance tend to drop out the parts that don't fit their world view. I recall on the first day after John Kennedy's assassination of witnesses pointing at the grassy knoll. I remember the day TWA flight 800 blew up of witnesses talking about a bright spark coming up from a small boat and hitting the plane. I recommend you reread William Shirer's book, pages 1107 through 1112. This doesn't explain how the cameraman knew when to start cranking his camera. Those cameras were the latest thing. But the film had to be prepped in a water bath before loading into the camera. The film was only good for a couple of hours before it had to go back into the water bath.

This doesn't explain how the radar men avoided courts martial. Their sole job was to observe and report any unexpected ship or plane movements. When the wave of planes approached Hawaii from the north, they shut off the radar and didn't tell anyone. That could be classed as treason. There are also rabid Marxists in this country. But it is illegal to publicly suspect anyone of Marxist sympathies -- even if they admit to them! No, I recall the massacre of over 80 million people for the good of Humanity. They were strictly following the "communist" theory. I'm referring to the ease of their shifting to National Socialism in the last ten years. See Jerry Pournelle's political axes for how close the far left and the far right are to each other.Despite a people's baser motives, they have to have a higher justification for what they are doing if they are going to initiate a war. The Muslims want a guarantee of heaven, so they engage in "holy" Jihad. The Americans were still smarting from 9/11 when the president offered Sadam Hussein as a dangerous tyrant developing nukes. The Humanists worked hard to destroy marriages to create children of wrath. Then they re-direct that wrath at politically correct targets of their choice. (I suspect I will be one of those targets one of these days.)

I agree. Jesus said that what he saw the Father do he also did. Prophecy is seeing visions either as spiritual photos or spiritual video clips. Jesus was like us in all ways except his divinity. That means he exemplified the perfect Christian walk -- that any Christian can do. But to do it, you have to have divine guidance.

Why can't you spell right even with a spell checker?!?

The Normals are misusing perfectly good words for their own ends. For those who have no interest in truth, they will use words simply for the emotional loading on the word. Homosexuals destroyed the good word, "gay," to milk it of all positive meaning. The vegetarians are using the word "terrorist" against omnivores. Humanists use the word "paranoid" as an epithet against the people they are told are politically incorrect.

The information you get is not from a neutral "force." Nor is it just the subconscious adding two plus two together. I'm sure you have come up with information that your subconscious couldn't possibly have known.

There is a supernatural beyond the four dimensional continuum. You are opening yourself to supernatural beings to tell you things. You are part spirit yourself. You're attracting supernatural beings to your house as well. Do you 'see' any shadow creatures? Do you hear any unexplainable noises?

The supernatural is divided into two political camps. One is headed by the creator of this space-time continuum. The other is headed by a rebel band of angels. When your body dies, you will be stuck with whichever camp you sided with down here.

Ah, magic. Fun stuff.

I revert to Clarke's third law here. In fact, one of my races has a technology (well, power source) that has almost unlimited applications. their name for it: Maj'shick. (Sci-fi. What can't it do?)

In all seriousness, though, there is some really crazy and unexplained stuff in the world. I generally take the biblical approach, which is: "Don't mess with that stuff" Power comes from somewhere. If I don't know or understand where that power comes from, I don't want to mess with it.

I think the best thing we can do here is agree to disagree peaceably and be done with it. You aren't going to convince me that that I'm headed for any kind eternal damnation just because I hold an opinion different from what you espouse. Likewise, I'm not going to try to talk down what for you seems to do you some good. I'm happy for you that your faith sustains you as you want it to do. Unfortunately, you and others like you probably can't envision the idea that what's good for you may not be good for someone else, and that every person should have the free will to decide for themselves what's best for them. You have the right to live the way you wish, but that doesn't extend to stepping on other people's having that same right. If that makes me a secular humanist, or whatever other label you want to try to put down, then yeah, I'm a whatever. You disagreeing with me, however, does not diminish me or what I follow. I hope you have the breadth of vision to realize that me disagreeing with you doesn't need to diminish you or what you believe, either. It's a big planet. There's room for all kinds.

As for seeing or hearing things, well, it's one thing to see or hear them. It's quite another to take what they show or say on blind faith, without a healthy dose of skepticism. As a friend of mine put it, "If Uncle Joe was an ass when he was alive, he's probably still an ass now that he's dead." Accessing my subconscious, however, helps me put pieces I already have together in new ways, so I can evaluate them more thoroughly. That's called making an informed, thought-out assessment of whatever for myself, rather than letting someone or something else make it for me. For me, anything less is not acting at my best potential. Someone else, however, could spend as much time rereasoning whatever out as I do and come up with a completely different answer. That is the variety that is the spice of life.

Last edited by Koldune on 13 Aug 2008, 7:40 am, edited 2 times in total.

Sorry, but this is another long one.

No one has gotten access to ALL the "secret government papers" because only some of the ones belonging to the US, France, Russia, Italy, postwar Germany, etc. have been released. In his postscript, Shirer states that some of his documents were unpublished. He also does not list documents that I know have been released since then. I also know that a significant number of documents related to WWII were released by the US government only last year. Why do I know? I requested copies for my own research into what happened to my Grandmother's first husband, so that she could finally know the details of his death. All these years without even knowing where he died, or even the date. She finally knows.

The history is not "new and improved." It's just updated by newly released primary source material. Shirer's book could also be considered, to some degree, primary source material, when he is describing what he, himself, saw. Otherwise, he is filtering history through his own perspective lens just as much as any other historian is. None of us, no historian, no reporter, no one can write a perfectly unbiased report of anything. We color it through our own past, our own experiences. A German reporter would see the war differently than a reporter from Switzerland. Neither would be impartial, though. I agree with you that some people, and (unfortunately) some of them are historians, DO have an agenda and DO leave out things that disagree with that agenda. If they state that agenda at the beginning of whatever they write, you can at least read what they have written with a grain of salt. Take two. They're small. A good historian will consider his or her professional reputation and genuinely try to present the story of the past as clearly and as accurately as possible.

If a book came out using newly released documents and new evidence from recently discovered documented diaries showing that the "shooter on the grassy knoll" was the JFK killer, would you accept the "new and improved" version of that history? And if new evidence for TWA flight 800 came out decisively indicating that it was shot down in a terrorist action, would you then accept that the prior version was incorrect? You can't have it both ways, you know.



Reread. Noted that it also mentioned mobilization of the Soviet army on the German front, Molotov's suspicions that the Germans were going to attack, preemptive German testing of the Soviet lines, and a communique to the Soviet ambassador declaring war before the invasion.



You're still leaning too much on conspiracy theorists. Photographs were not of the first wave of attacks. Japanese knew the defects of US radar, which dated from WWI, and flew beneath the radar. The Japanese fleet stayed outside radar range. The radar was NOT turned OFF.



Since when is that illegal? I don't just suspect a friend of mine. I KNOW he does. He just doesn't have any intentions of inciting a violent overthrow of the US government. That would be the only part that would be illegal.



You are still thinking about the individuals used as troops in the war, not the political powers inciting the war. I'm not certain who said this--I'll follow up with a reference later--but it was a politician during the WWII era. "War is politics by another means." They then "justify" their war by using idealistic terms in order to "sell" it to the masses, so that others will die for their gain. BTW, humanists did nothing to destroy my first marriage. Alcolholism killed him at a very young age. Nor my second. He was a sociopath and should rightly be imprisoned for life for what he did. A lot of marriages might now be saved if our culture learned that valuing marriage in reality, instead of just paying it lip service, was a good plan. It might also be a good thing to value our chiildren enough to make being a stay at home mom an honorable thing. Right now, I get asked "What do YOU do?" and when I answer, the person's eyes sort of glaze over, then they wander off to look for someone interesting to talk to. Yes, I'm a historian and an artist. But for a little while, I'm a historian and artist AT HOME while I preschool my 4yo. She needs me more than the outside world does.

Meanwhile, you appear to actually qualify as far right. I suspect that I'm somewhat centrist, but with conservative views in many areas.

You'll be a target? Dearheart, you've watched too many X-Files. Unless you're making front page headlines, you're not big enough to be a target. Otherwise, my Mom and I, with our outspoken attitudes, would have been ground chickies long ago. Great-grandma would have been a suffragette if she hadn't been so busy being the closest thing the Big Moccasin Gap had to a physician at the time.

Wow, you dont have a very good grasp of language do you bub. You dont seem to understand that words can have multiple meanings and the implication of "paranoia" was NOT to imply that the nigerians were mentally deranged; it was meant to imply mass hysteria based on false information which does NOT require or imply mental illness. You're using this thread as a mouthpiece for conspiracy theory BS and christian fundamentalist propaganda. You keep making claim after claim after claim and providing not a SINGLE SHRED of documentation other than a phoney claim of having "reliable sources". I really think this thread should be locked and TimT can take his BS to somewhere were people might actually want to hear it.

No, I don't think locking the thread would be fair. It started as query on whether or not people believe in magic in the tool sense, as opposed to stage magic. Now, if the moderators thought that the discussion was getting too heated, maybe they might have a point in shutting it down. Personally, I don't think it has gone that far. TimT has only expressed his opinion, whatever any of the rest of us think of the content therein, or of what we think he shows of himself. I disagree with him on just about everything he has said, but he has as much right to say it as anyone does. He thinks magic is inherently a bad idea. Doubtless others do, too. Unless he starts advocating burning those of us who embrace magic at the stake or something similar, though, I'd say we simply have a very spirited discussion going. Isn't that part of what Wrong Planet is all about?

Actually, when I'd look at the thread's content closely, I don't see that anyone's in any danger of the thread turning nasty. If anything, I don't read anyone as having really bought what TimT is trying to sell. A couple of people expressed a wish not to involve themselves with magic, but nobody else is blaming the world's ills on anything that doesn't vote straight-ticket, theocratic conservative. If successful propaganda was TimT's intent, he's failing miserably. Your response, and those of several of the rest of us, is evidence of that.

nope the belief ended with the end of the middle ages not dark ages. and its very often true that spirutual problems come hand in hand with psychological ones. demons like to prey on the afflicted.

The core issues of this thread seem to boil down to:

1) "Magic is real, and that it's a good idea to learn as much as possible about it."

2) "Magic is real, and that it's a very bad idea to learn anything at all about it."

3) "Magic is a myth, and that any discussions about it, while entertaining, are not really important."

4) "Magic is a myth, and that it's a waste of time to discuss it any further or at all."

Personally, I stand with the fourth statement.

You, sir, just won the thread. Have a cookie.

You might be right if one uses the definition of the "dark ages" as having ended around 1000 A.D. - but the term is not precise and can be applied in a variety of ways. I personally think that the dark ages extended from the collapse of the Greek empire to the enlightenment. And I am reconsidering my original assertion that most people abandoned the idea of demons causing mental illness ... why pretend that the enlightenment extended to most people? The ideas of the enlightenment may be dominant in certain circles, but people are people.

It always disappoints me when people say they believe in majic and wicca.

Like I would be if someone said they believe that Lord of the Rings is a true story.

I agree with you. After all, the God I serve respects people's right to chose. I just wish you could have the good I found in Jesus Christ. I became a Christian out of similar occult practices because I found them to be less good than the spiritual power and information I got through Jesus.

My only anger is toward people like Fnord who claimed to be a Christian and shows not the least characteristic of being a Christian.