Atheist Memes

Because magic has in common verbiage typically been used to describe phenomena we don't know the mechanism behind.

And all those other things we do understand the mechanism behind. Along the way to understand how we figured out standards that elevate physical phenomena from imagined ones, and slowly we found that there's very little room left for the unknowable to affect our reality.

So if the word magic is to have any distinct meaning, there's only left "that which isn't real enough to affect us".

But you're of course free to redefine words as feels useful to you. I find flying, quantum teleportation, and cognition magical, but that more describes the wonder and awe of the inner workings of my world, rather than if it's real or not.

I did not define the word magic. Society did that. My choice is to communicate effectively, which means largely respecting the established consensus on which words mean what. If you'd rather render yourself ineffectual by using your own personal alternate definitions for established words, that is your choice, but it's not a choice that aligns with my or most other people's priorities.

Besides, "magic" only has whimsy associated with it because we restrict it to fake things. If we'd been calling electricity "magic" all along, "magic" would be mundane and you'd be over here complaining that we don't use a more whimsical term like "etherics" or "thaumaturgy" or "electricity."

As for wonder... what the flippity floppity fuck are you even talking about? The scientific world is full of wonder. Wonder is what drives science in the first place, and it has nothing at all to do with terminology. If you look up at the night sky and are too distracted by vocabulary to feel wonder at the pretty lights shining across unfathomable temporal and spatial distances, well, that seems more like a deficiency in you than any sort of flaw in which arbitrary sounds and squiggles we've picked out to describe things with.

For something to be real to science, it needs to be measurable.

If magic was measurable, we wouldn't call it magic.

Magic, by definition, is not real.

You could call quantum mechanics "magic", but we just call it quantum mechanics

As Terry Pratched put it, magic is the knowlege of obscure things, knowing stuff the others don't know. That's why you call computer-savvy people "wizards"

Magic can be anything as long as we are willing to twist the definition so much it describes fucking nothing

Because reality is way too complex and we need to have clear, well documented, error-proof ways to understand it. Wonder and amazement can follow after the understanding of what is true. Is alway better to have "boring" but clear terminologies and a well documented way to expain phenomenon, instead of mixing "Facts" with "Romance" just because we like the sound of certain words. Also, the term "magic" is just a filler, a " deux ex machina", it didn't explain nothing.

Because I use logic and rationality to observe and define the world around me as opposed to unfounded delusional thought. I didn’t “choose” to define magic as unreal, it simply is.

It’s not that I “don’t want to live in a world of whimsy and wonder”, I just don’t believe in the supernatural, and am not going to waste my time convincing myself of something that doesn’t exist. Same reason I don’t believe in a god.

Wh... why are you telling me what I believe and think?

Also, no, you would not be scientifically accurate in describing computer wizards as summoning spirits from magic rocks, because spirits are not a scientific concept.

Spirit means many different things to many people, such that few will 100% agree on its qualities on properties. It is basically a religious concept with an extreme amount of variance depending on who you talk to, generally it could be said to be a sort of 'essence' of a person or thing, but some would even disagree with that.

What does or does not have a spirit? People? Animals? Rocks? Only magic rocks? Water? Concepts (Zeitgeists)?

What does a spirit do? How does it do what it does? How can you know whether it is present? Is it limited by time and space, temporarily and spatially localized? Or is it in many places at once, or does it persist through time? Do spirits have personalities? Do they have forms, or bodies?

What you mean by spirit?

I don't know, but I also won't presume to know someone else's thoughts.

Anyway, I did not define magic as anything, though I love studying the esoteric and the occult and learning what different peoples in different times have believed.

There are many forms of magic. Some of them relatively simple in both exercise and effect, others vastly complex and purporting astounding powers and abilities. Alchemy (Spiritual Purification / Inner Alchemy / Gnosis Englightenment and Proto Chemistry), Divining, Scrivining, Tarot, Evocation, Wards, Spells, Charms, Hexe/Curses, Secret Languages... theres so much more.

What typically differentiates magic from non magic for most people is probably the idea of a well understood, provably reliable causal mechanism.

In the past, when little was understood, concepts from religion, folklore, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, chemistry... much of this was jumbled together such that dividing those listed ideas into their modern constituent concepts would be anachronistic for to varying degrees for different places and time periods.

Over time, more and more ideas were tested via experimentation, experimentation itself became more rigorous, and our understanding of those causal mechanisms, and technological use of them, increased dramatically.

I would say that 'Magic' can be said to be the ideas, that were not found to reliably have a reproducible effect, that were found to not be functionally useful beyond creating an experience of profundity to the practitioners.

As an example I can attempt to speak Enochian to evoke Metatron to aid in sealing some particular demon by using the Lesser Key of Solomon, but this will not actually do anything unless I convince myself that it has in fact done something, that there was a demon to be sealed, etc.

It would be extremely helpful if you could describe precisely your conception of magic so that an actual discussion could be had, as that seems to be what you are looking for.

In my experience with magic believers/practitioners, all of them will tell you that their specific conception of magic is correct and nearly all others are wrong, so it is quite difficult to avoid accidentally strawmanning them.

But uh, you later switch to a different meaning of the word magic when you describe it as a wondrous and whimsical way to experience the world.

Personally, I find wonder and whimsy through understanding the vast intricacies of nature as science describes it.

How wondrous it is that we live in a world where the laws of optics allow a crepuscular ray from a burning star, following the laws of nuclear physics, to illuminate a lonely grove of plants, whose biology is wonderfully complex.

In closing, I do not know what you mean by magic.

Could you perhaps describe magic as a concept, or some specific instance of it or magical procedure?

Because I like knowing exactly how and why something works, and by extension knowing that if I wanted to, I could make another one just like it, or one that uses the same principle to do something slightly different, or that if I take the one in front of me and modify it just here I can make it do something completely new. I like science because I love knowing. I love taking things and making them do things they couldn't before. That's why I became a programmer -- because I could do that to computers -- and what got me so excited about open source. The idea that if I find something that doesn't work exactly the way I like, all I need are the right skills, and I can change it so that it does. If I hear someone say they wish something that doesn't exist existed, all I need are the right skills and I can make that happen. I am a scientist. I am unstoppable. I can change the world on a whim, and naught but my own ignorance stands in the way.

I will never understand the mindset that sees something it does not understand and decides it would rather think of it as something beautiful and unknowable than try to understand it. Why do you accept the world as it is? Why do you accept that there are things we cannot know when you think of all the good we could do if we knew them?

The artist looks at something that exists and sees that it is good. The engineer looks at something that exists and knows that it could be better, and a piece of their soul cries out to make it so.

KidnappedByKitties nailed it, I think.

But I absolutely love and agree with your perspective, too. I think we went too hard into understanding the physical side of reality while rejecting the role of spirituality with the Enlightenment.

I believe physical reality is just one side of a coin.

We need to regain a spiritual view without giving up how we understand physical reality, and without all the literal trappings of organized religion.

A second Enlightenment?