Is the Bible a magic book?

[Politesse]

You are just not that interesting enough to engage with.

I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[rousseau]

Any form of divination certainly qualifies.

Regardless of how badly it fails?
That’s some magic!

Most people who practice forms of divination do not regard them as having a low success rate.

Wow. Seriously, I did not expect that response. But I acknowledge it as a relevant fact. We DO all create our own reality. But I also believe - perhaps wrongly - that there exists an external reality that is constrained by natural “laws”, and about which we can learn.

I don’t think “magic” advances learning or understanding at all. I cannot deny its possible (emotional) value to “believers” but tend to think belief in it is a symptom of a weakness of character and/or mind, at least for those with access to better information.

Consider this scenario. A man in the Eastern Congo comes home to find his wife and children killed by militants. He's devastated but his faith in God allows him to carry on. Do you try to convince this man that God doesn't exist? Why or why not? For this person, faith is a shield and in real terms very helpful.

If you abide by the rule of 'progress' and think we're on the steady march to perfection, then the answer is 'absolutely everyone, everywhere needs to be enlightened'. But if you're in the 'reality is actually pretty shitty for much of the world' camp, then belief in magic has utility in very real terms. Even evolutionary terms.

 

[Elixir]

Consider this scenario. A man in the Eastern Congo comes home to find his wife and children killed by militants. He's devastated but his faith in God allows him to carry on. Do you try to convince this man that God doesn't exist?

Hell no! The ability to carry on by FAR supersedes any drawback to the superstition that is enabling them to do so. Maybe at some future date...

If you abide by the rule of 'progress' and think we're on the steady march to perfection, then the answer is 'absolutely everyone, everywhere needs to be enlightened'. But if you're in the 'reality is actually pretty shitty for much of the world' camp, then belief in magic has utility in very real terms. Even evolutionary terms.

I agree wholeheartedly. A couple of points:
* The 'rule of progress' is bullshit IMHO.
* Reality being pretty shitty for much of the world doesn't excuse anyone for whom things are not that shitty, and who are enjoying modern tech like free access to the internet, from indulging in superstitions that are unnecessary to their "carrying on", and are in fact impediments to their understanding of the world around them.

 

[rousseau]

Consider this scenario. A man in the Eastern Congo comes home to find his wife and children killed by militants. He's devastated but his faith in God allows him to carry on. Do you try to convince this man that God doesn't exist?

Hell no! The ability to carry on by FAR supersedes any drawback to the superstition that is enabling them to do so. Maybe at some future date...

If you abide by the rule of 'progress' and think we're on the steady march to perfection, then the answer is 'absolutely everyone, everywhere needs to be enlightened'. But if you're in the 'reality is actually pretty shitty for much of the world' camp, then belief in magic has utility in very real terms. Even evolutionary terms.

I agree wholeheartedly. A couple of points:
* The 'rule of progress' is bullshit IMHO.
* Reality being pretty shitty for much of the world doesn't excuse anyone for whom things are not that shitty, and who are enjoying modern tech like free access to the internet, from indulging in superstitions that are unnecessary to their "carrying on", and are in fact impediments to their understanding of the world around them.

Even for those where things aren't that bad, life is still a bit of a struggle/scary. To me, it's not surprising at all that religious belief correlates with the poor, and atheism correlates with wealth. There are other factors at play, but the psychological boost is massive.

 

[Elixir]

To me, it's not surprising at all that religious belief correlates with the poor, and atheism correlates with wealth.

I think the causal arrow points in the direction you imply (poverty tends to cause belief), but not exclusively. There are plenty of predatory religious individuals and organizations that try to suck whatever wealth they are able, out of their impoverished faithful.
Visit some poor Catholic areas of say, Mexico, and see how the Church sucks the lifeblood out of any hope of economic freedom for its congregation, while adorning the actual physical church with riches beyond imagination.

 

[steve_bank]

Atheism correlates with wealth and religion does not?

That does not jive with reality, at least over here and the Mid East Muslim oil states. They are very conservative theists in the Mid East.

Christians thank god if they are successful, and praise god when things go badly. The cliche is nothing happens without a reason, god has a plan for me.

 

[Elixir]

That does not jive with reality, at least over here and the Mid East Muslim oil states

Do the vast majority of residents of "oil states" benefit from the riches? Or are they kept in poverty and blind obeisance by the few who control their lives - religious or otherwise?
^ Sincere question; I am not familiar at all with "oil state" culture.

 

[Jarhyn]

Any form of divination certainly qualifies.

Regardless of how badly it fails?
That’s some magic!

So, I'm not sure I buy the "consistent definition" any more than I buy the traditionally "consistent definition" of free will.

Divination is a mechanism for creating a bounded effectively probabilistic map for association to some question. The core statement of what makes it "magic" is because it gives the diviner access to something they can use to create something else.

Some forms of divination are useful, for instance, for reminding the reader to think about stuff they would not normally or otherwise do. Its a weird kind of partially effective task scheduler for self-inspection and self-direction tasks, and for other things.

That's why people called it "magic". Because they didn't understand why but doing it had some better-than-luck chance of leading them to something they probably needed to think about anyway.

If you don't like the answer an 8-ball gives, after all, you shake it again. The point to that is that it's really a tool for helping understand the shapes of our own feelings more clearly, has use, and people recognize the use without understanding mechanisms.

 

[rousseau]

That does not jive with reality, at least over here and the Mid East Muslim oil states

Do the vast majority of residents of "oil states" benefit from the riches? Or are they kept in poverty and blind obeisance by the few who control their lives - religious or otherwise?
^ Sincere question; I am not familiar at all with "oil state" culture.

Oil states are also a case of rapid wealth, where the culture hasn't caught up. You can't just give people a bunch of money and expect them to convert the next day, there are social factors at play. But some of these regions are moving that way.

 

[steve_bank]

That does not jive with reality, at least over here and the Mid East Muslim oil states

Do the vast majority of residents of "oil states" benefit from the riches? Or are they kept in poverty and blind obeisance by the few who control their lives - religious or otherwise?
^ Sincere question; I am not familiar at all with "oil state" culture.

I believe so. I think Saudi Arabia is constitutionally socialsti. It natioalized oil. It has tried to versify but did not get very far.

Oil revenues supports the people directly or indirectly. Tat is why the Arabs panic when price per barrel falls below break even.

Part of the problem in Saudi Arabia was getting men to work, they are too used to being on the dole. There has been penty of reprting of abuse and slave like labor for foreign workers.

Arabs at the top are wealthy. Back in the 90s a company I worked for designed the inflight entertainment system for the 747 of the grand pooba of Bahrain. utter opulence.

An engineerr from the company took a job on the flight crew of a Saudi minster's 747. As she put it they loaded up with cars and jet skis and headed out for a week of debauhery then flew back putting om conservative dress and relgious airs.

Iran is different, it had a diverse economy before the sanctions.

 

[Elixir]

Arabs at the top are wealthy.

And per your descriptions, they are only pretend religious. They put on a show for their subjects, but keep them subjugated AFAICS. Those subjects may be religious, and may or may not be poor. Do you know? Are they religious because of their poverty? Or are they religious in spite being wealthy?

 

[steve_bank]

It has changed in the economy. Entry into the wealthy club usually required at least outward Christianity. It remains in politics.

Wealthy pro athletes often publicaly thank god for their success. When Russel Wilson was in Seattle when on TV he was always thanking god and expressing faith.

It has been reportd that with RCC losing priests and participation in the west it has focused on por populations in South America.

 

[Elixir]

It has been reportd that with RCC losing priests and participation in the west it has focused on por populations in South America.

I wouldn't doubt it. They're a model of predatory behavior.

 

[bilby]

That does not jive with reality, at least over here and the Mid East Muslim oil states

Do the vast majority of residents of "oil states" benefit from the riches? Or are they kept in poverty and blind obeisance by the few who control their lives - religious or otherwise?
^ Sincere question; I am not familiar at all with "oil state" culture.

I believe so. I think Saudi Arabia is constitutionally socialsti. It natioalized oil. It has tried to versify but did not get very far.

The Arab oil states get around their religion's requirements to share the wealth (a requirement that has indeed led to official "socialism") by having an utterly minuscule number of extremely wealthy citizens, and a large number of poor, non-citizen residents who do literally all the work.

These are mostly desert nations, whose pre-oil boom populations were tiny. When the European and American colonial powers came in to start drilling, these tiny numbers of Arabs got very rich, very fast, and they did what the European and American aristocrats did - they stopped working, and used their vast riches to import an army of servants from the third world.

The economy in the sandbox consists today of three very clearly delimited classes with essentially zero mobility between them. At the top are the Sheikhs, who have almost all of the money, and are the only citizens. Nobody else gets a vote; If anyone else doesn't like the way the country is run, they can lump it. This group can do almost literally anything, and are essentially above the law.

Below them in the hierarchy are imported specialists - mostly engineers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, military advisers, etc., mostly from North America and Europe, with a handful from Russia and the former Warsaw Pact, and increasingly some Chinese. These expatriate specialists get paid very generous salaries (compared to what is available in their home countries), and generally live fairly well, but have no rights whatsoever. Their residence is entirely at the whim of the authorities, and can be cancelled for almost any reason; Losing your job is almost always a ticket "home", even if you've been resident for decades and have established a family and/or a home.

At the bottom are the "guest workers", many little more than slaves. They come from poorer nations (particularly the Philippines), and are treated and paid very poorly. As they cannot afford the price of a plane ticket back to their country of origin, they are effectively forced to do whatever their employers say, and to tolerate any conditions imposed on them. They live in (usually substandard) accommodation blocks, and are paid infrequently and sometimes not at all. Very little is done to assist the people caught in this trap, who are largely invisible to the rest of the world. The Qatar World Cup did briefly cause some hand-wringing about the fact that literal slaves were doing a large fraction of the construction work for the stadiums and other facilities, but nothing substantial was done about it.

Much like the US antebellum South, they are able to claim that all their citizens are well off, by the simple expedient of declaring all the poor residents to be non-citizens, and in some cases, not even human (which means they can truthfully claim to be protecting all citizens' human rights).

Of course, within each of these three broad classes, there exist internal hierarchies. There are guest workers who have trade skills such as plumbers and electricians, who are treated almost as well as the specialist class; And there are "poor" citizens who have to do "jobs" in the government bureaucracy to make ends meet (though they don't generally contribute much, and tend to just get in the way of the actual workers, while being untouchable and arrogant - it's like an entire nation is employing the boss's idiot nephew, largely because that's exactly what's going on).

 

[bilby]

Iran is different

Iran is completely different from the Arab states in almost every possible way. Iranians get rightly offended if you lump them together with the Arabs.

Iran was a proper nation, for whom oil wealth was a bonus, rather than the entire reason for their existence, until the establishment of a totalitarian theocracy brought everything to a crashing halt and threw the nation back into the middle ages.

The USA could and should take pause at what happened to Iran (but of course, it won't, because the wannabe theocratic folks in the USA don't care about anything outside their borders, and the don't wanna be folks aren't much better, and are convinced "it couldn't happen here" - just like the Persian middle classes were in Tehran before the Islamic Revolution).

Interestingly, Russia is the key "behind the scenes" player in the attempt to establish theocratic rule in both nations, in order to weaken those that they perceive as their enemies.

 

[steve_bank]

At the top of religion it is always about money, power, and inflence.

The pope acts like the RCC is in the distant past when it had political and military power.

Billy Gram went from a traveling preacher in the old Revival Movement to international fame, influence, and wealth.

 

[Rhea]

Consider this scenario. A man in the Eastern Congo comes home to find his wife and children killed by militants. He's devastated but his faith in God allows him to carry on. Do you try to convince this man that God doesn't exist? Why or why not? For this person, faith is a shield and in real terms very helpful.

Or, you try to convince him to carry on for secular reasons. Neither attacking his belief, nor bolstering it. Simply demonstrating the alternative without an agenda. That helps him in that if he loses his faith, he does not enter dispair.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Consider this scenario. A man in the Eastern Congo comes home to find his wife and children killed by militants. He's devastated but his faith in God allows him to carry on. Do you try to convince this man that God doesn't exist? Why or why not? For this person, faith is a shield and in real terms very helpful.

Or, you try to convince him to carry on for secular reasons. Neither attacking his belief, nor bolstering it. Simply demonstrating the alternative without an agenda. That helps him in that if he loses his faith, he does not enter dispair.

The only reason any of us are here is because of our ancestors, real people with flesh and blood and who struggled and lived and died. That's where our "faith" ought to reside. They triumphed. That's the real magic in our lives, not phony baloney about magic creatures living in the sky. Maybe magic creature belief is a decent childish beginning to a better appreciation of our circumstance. The bible actually demonstrates that. You don't need the magic, just an appreciation of what people everywhere have always gone through. The only reason the magic is still around is because it's quite the satisfying experience for our brains, a bit of a high, good chemicals.

It's never too late to shock a person with the truth that is reality. Just don't be preachy about it and always have compassion and empathy.

 

[James Brown]

There is a story the Stoics liked to repeat about a general who lost his entire family to the enemy. It was devastating news, discovered all at once, like that scene in Gladiator when Maximus rushes back to his farm, only to find everything he loved had been destroyed, desecrated.

All expected the general to fall to pieces. Instead, he gathered himself and, as Epictetus tells us, said, “I knew they were mortal when I had them.” And then he carried on living as best he could.

I'ts Not About the One-Liners

Losing your family is a terrible thing. Thinking that they will or ought to live forever is self-deception.

Religion says, "Trust God." Philosophy says, "Memento Mori" and "Only focus on what you can control."

 

[Learner]

When called to account for pretending to channel God, creos keep referring to a book. They call it God's word, even though it is a compilation of a lot of words, few of which are actually attributed by that book itself to a God.Then I am told that it is "infallible", which turns out to mean that if my plain reading of the infallible text conflicts with observable reality, either my observations of reality or my plain reading of the text must be flawed.

I've often hear this similar to you Elixir, even people from other religions debating with Christians. Personally I could never get why some people make those 'erroneous conceptual arguments' that tries to portray that confliction with human logic. The miracles that's written about of God doing things that's not logically possible, shouldn't therefore be possible etc..

Yes we'll, God isn't suppose to be logical! That's conceptually the logic.

How can this be? I suppose it's possible if the god who wrote that book took every measure to deceive me ( @Learner knows god and assures me he doesn't pull that crap) for purposes beyond my meager comprehension. but how is it possible to reconcile all the myriad differing interpretations of that book? There is either ONE correct interpretation (hear the chorus of "mine is the right one!") or the "true" meaning is highly variable, or ... the one 'possibility' that alleviates all this confusion, validates the infallibility of the book, and vindicates creos' version of reality. And that very distant IMO possibility is...

The Bible is a MAGIC book!
But... why can't creos just come out and say that?

As a Christian in the modern world. I would say in todays language... God is the ultimate scientist. It's written plain to see, magic is detested by God. In a manner of speaking, magic is merely the counterfeit, a very poor imitation to give the illusion one is creating objects into existence.

Deuteronomy 18:10-12

10 Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft,
11 or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead.