I love the snow! Thus I hate the Ozarks.
It rarely flippin’ snows here. I was born and raised (mostly) in Colorado. I have snow in my blood! And in SW Missouri, some years you can count on one hand the number of times it snows that Winter. Any precipitation (aside from just plain humidity) usually comes in the form of freezing rain and the ocassional ice storm.

I lived in Iowa for a couple of years, and they knew how to do snow! Snow on the ground for weeks on end! Beautiful, wonderful, snow!

As I said, it’s snowing now…but melting as it hits the ground. *sigh* To live in Colorado again. Or Iowa. Except, I hate the land of Iowa. The people are the best! The friendliest, open-minded people. Generally smart and not afraid of education, unlike Missourians. The people in Missouri are stubborn, ultra-conservatives who are self-absorbed and self-righteous. They mistrust high falutin’ edumacationing and book learnin’. But, boy I do like the hills and trees and foliage of the Ozarks.

If I were omnipotent, I’d merge the three states so that the Rockies were surrounded by the Ozark hills, keeping the history of Colorado, with the people and weather or Iowa.

The God of the Old Testament was a heartless, murderous psychopath, in my opnion.
Just look at this one chapter, Joshua 11
Skeptic’s Annotated
NRSV
NIV

This verse is quite nice:
“For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses.”
- Joshua 11:20

And of course, one of my favorite passages dealing with God ordained abortion, curses, and justified male jealosy and wife ownership:
Skeptic’s Annotated Bible
NIV
NRSV

Schitzophrenic? Check out Genesis 6:5 and then 8:21. Whichever translation you like.
He kills all humans and innocent animals because humans are wicked (did He not see this coming?) And then declares that he will not flood the Earth again, BECAUSE men are wicked.

And what’s the moral of the story:
Judges 19
Where the host of a visitor offers up his virgin daughter to appease a mob bent on rape (seems to be a lot of these situations), they take the concubine instead and rape her to death. Then the master chops her into 12 pieces and sends them to the ends of Israel.
Nice.

Addendum added later: Don’t take this as my believing God himself is a murderous psycho, but rather that religion creates and supports behavior and beliefs that admire a murderous psychotic God. I don’t believe God has human traits and fallabilities. Humans have projected our own fear, greed, hate, prejudices upon God. How can you not read stories like these and not think of every other religion where Gods are petty and cruel and act exactly like childish humans with supreme power? The Greeks, Romans, Babalonyans, Egyptians, Pacific Rim native tribes, Maorians, Celts, Goths…the Judeao-Christian God is no different. He’s presented and fashioned with so many human falibilities and weaknesses…we have created him in our image.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/index.html
Wow! Fantastic. An excellent source for pointing out, verse by verse, the contradictions, injustice, intolarance, and absrudities of the Bible. And there’s a LOT of them!

Now I don’t have to rely on just the ones I remember: The two different orders of Creation, who and what was found at the open tomb and by who and what was said contradicting the oher Gospels, when and where Mary, Joseph, and Jesus went after the birth contradicted among the Gospels, etc.

Plus the whole hypocracy of Bible-thumping judgement against something someone doesn’t approve of, but ignoring the thousands of other rules and commands that are riddled throughout the Bible that Christians tend to ignore or arbitrarily decide don’t apply anymore.

There’s also in-line links to the Brick Testament. God I love that site!

So many loudspoken, er, outspoken people fighting to turn the country into a fundamentalist theocracy (see: Taliban and Afghanistan) make the claim: “America was founded on Christian priciples!” or like the former Judge Moore “Our Constitution has the 10 Commandments as its base.”

Our Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves. Most were Deists, Freethinkers, and Unitarians. Nowhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Indidendance or Articles of Confederacy (the proto-Constitution) is there any mention to the Bible, the Commandments, Christ, or anything spiritual other than a God as creator of nature and the world.

But here is what they have said in their own words:

George Washington:
“The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of clergy.”

“As the government of the United States of America is NOT IN ANY SENSE FOUNDED ON THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION….”

John Adams:
From a letter to Charles Cushing (October 19, 1756):
“Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.’”

“But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed.–John Adams in a letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816, 2000 Years of Disbelief–John A. Haught

“The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartoads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.”

Benjamin Franklin:
“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” Poor Richard, 1758

“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.” Poor Richard, 1758

“Religion I found to be without any tendency to inspire, promote, or confirm morality, serves principally to divide us and make us unfriendly to one another.”

Thomas Jefferson:
“Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on a man.”

“I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.”–Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Samuel Miller, 1808

Letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own”

(one of my favorites…)
Letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, August 10, 1787:
“Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”

James Madison:
Letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774:
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise”

“Gordon S. Wood, in his 1992 book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” states that, by the 1790′s only about 10% of the American population regularly attended religious services to quote just one statistic. Not exactly an indication of a wholehearted national commitment to Christianity! It is a matter of simple historical fact that the United States was not founded as, nor was it ever intended to be, a Christian nation.

You can find these and other quotes here:
http://www.herbertwarmstrong.com/christian-founding-fathers2.htm
http://www.deism.org/foundingfathers.htm

So, what should you do now? Look them up. Do a little research on your own and try to find in archives, collections, and books that catalogue the writings of the Founding Fathers and find what you see for yourself. Be skeptical. Don’t believe something just because someone tells you to, but don’t dismiss it out of hand just because you don’t like what it implies. Do your own unbiased research with an open mind and see what you find.

As I continue to read, late into this night, I find more Web thoughts that are nearly identical to my own, to whit, this essay on what is hell:
http://universist.org/fearofhell.htm

‘And what is Hell, anyway? According to Wikipedia’s entry on the subject, the Christian concept of Hell or “Gehenna” comes from “Gehinnom,” a Hebrew word for landfills containing dead bodies, which were periodically burned. In the New International Version of the Bible, the word “Hell” doesn’t appear until the New Testament. In the King James Version, Hell appears in the Old Testament numerous times, but as a mistranslation of words such as “Sheol,” meaning “the grave” — a place where everyone goes, both good and bad. Wikipedia also states that ancient Hebrews didn’t believe in the immortality of the soul, a claim that seems to be borne out by Psalm 6:4-5:”Return, O Lord, deliver my soul: oh save me for thy mercies’ sake. For in death there is no rememberance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?”‘

‘…I think the fear of Hell is mainly due to
social pressure. There are two billion Christians on Earth. How could they all be wrong? The answer is that they could be wrong just as easily as the four billion people who are not Christians. No one worries about going to the Hell of a religion they haven’t been indoctrinated into. Today no one worries about going to Hades, because they are free to examine the absurdity of Greek mythology, and to point out the dubious nature of its sources. Doing the same thing with one’s own religion is highly taboo. The best way to counter the social pressures of religion is to find a community of non-religious people to align oneself with. It is my hope that the Universist community can be an anchor for those who wish to rid themselves of the irrational fear of Hell.’

- Stuart Fulton

I plan on talking more about Universism more in my “Statement of Personal Belief” to come later. But here’s some thoughts I wanted to share now.

I actually just discovered Universism this evening while do more research on Deism (more on that later too.)
Intriguing…very likely not a direction I want to focus too much on but it has some very interesting ideas. It’s sort of a religion of Uncertainty designed to be embraced by Deists, Atheists, Agnostics, and Pantheists. I’m likely going to stick to just Deism. =)

But, here’s some snippets from the Universist Web site I liked:

“Love your fellow man not because an ancient book tells you to, but because you feel it is right. Do what is right not out of fear of punishment, but out of the joy of helping your fellow man. Love God not so that God will do your bidding, but because you love the universe God gave you to explore. Die not so that you may be martyred or eternally rewarded, but so you may rest.”
- creator if the Universist religion, Ford Vox
http://universist.org/fordvox.htm

“The new battleground is Uncertainty versus Certainty. Faith claims knowledge of absolute Truth; Universists claim knowledge of absolute spiritual and intellectual liberation, of the empowering fact that there is no universal Truth. It is Certainty that drives people to fly planes into buildings, and it is Uncertainty that drives people to fly rockets to the moon. We must protect humanity’s mysteries as we would protect our lives. At our most fundamental level, we wake up in the morning to see what will happen today. Faith is a cancer draining the vitality of the human spirit and our potential and future greatness.”
- creator if the Universist religion, Ford Vox
http://universist.org/120703speech.htm

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own – a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in Nature.”
- Albert Einstein

Amen.

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
- Galileo Galilei

Preach on!

I’ll probably put together a little page to fully express my own beliefs–but in the meantime, here’s a pretty good version:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/deism.htm

Sadly, I’ve been on an acute anti-religion kick the last 24-48 hours. =/
Well, I’m anti-religion in general anyway (again, religion and faith/belief are two very different things.)

But I found this today to be interesting: Instances of God ordered acts of immorality in the Bible.
Also, based on that but a different topic altogether, is an example of the non-omniscence of God being depicted in the Old Testament God saw how wicked the humans have become, as if somehow shocked and surprised and completely unexpected, so regreting his decision he decided to kill everyone but Noah’s family. Doesn’t sound very omnicent and omnibeneficent.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/imm_bibl.htm#menu
Bible supported slavery:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/sla_bibl.htm
A few more examples of what was considered immoral today was fine and dandy in Biblical times:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/mor_dive2.htm

Evidently, as I’ve always said, morality shifts over time and culture. What was once Biblically ordaned is now considered immoral and vise versa. Who’s to say what exactly is irrefutable law and what’s not so much any more. If a staunch Christian judges someone as sinful because they’re gay, what grounds does he really have when he has decided that other actions and behaviors that were once equally “sinful” are now, even by his own religious community” declared no longer sinful.

It was once ok, and still is if you take the Bible literally as 100% valid today, to have slaves and multiple wives and kill people for not believing as you. Now those Biblical virtues are considered immoral. Morality is fluid and subjective to time and place. And anyone who judges someone as being sinful or “against God” because of some Bible verse is a hypocrite and arbitrary.

Whoa. Nice timing. While my brain is snuggly entrentched in a theory/belief issue phase, I read this review of James Cameron’s “Aliens of the Deep,” by Roger Ebert. (The only film reviewer I ever read, because he’s the one closest to my own opinions, even if that’s only 75% of the time.)

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050127/REVIEWS/50114003/1023

“‘Aliens of the Deep’ is a convincing demonstration of Darwin’s theory of evolution, since it shows creatures not only adapted perfectly to their environment but obviously generated by that environment. It drives me crazy when people say evolution is “only a theory,” since that reveals they don’t know what a scientific theory is. As the National Geographic pointed out only a month ago, a theory is a scientific hypothesis that is consistent with observed and experimental data, and the observations and experiments must be able to be repeated. Darwin passes that test. His rival, creationism, is not a theory, but a belief. There is a big difference.”

Preach on, brother!

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=theory
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=belief

(This is a comment I made on a blog somewhere, where they posted quotes as truth. I felt it made for an entry for mine on its own.)

“One who claims to be a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs.” – Phillip E. Johnson

A staunch Christian then is rejecting the belief of all other Gods and religions, claiming their own belief is the ultimate “right” one…often providing “proof” that the others can’t be possible. In a sense, they’re atheists to all other beliefs than their own.

This is a mischaracterization of non-believers and non-belief in a theology. It’s a fallacy to assume that one HAS to BELIEVE in something. I’m not an atheist, I’m a deist. I DO believe in a God. However, most athiests will say that they believe in nothing because belief is not required. And the idea of believing in something that can’t be proven is a holdover of the idea that if something can’t be explained naturally, it must be supernatural.

That quote also misuses the term skeptic. A skeptic is not a non-believer, a skeptic is someone who examines and does not believe in something because they’re told to. They examine evidence, question rationale.

If you’re not going to believe one set of beliefs because there’s no evidence to support it, you can’t just claim what you believe is true because the others aren’t. Just because A and B and C and D are false, doesn’t make E true by default. It could be just as false. If one is going to say that belief is false for lack of proof, then you’re obligated to prove yours is true with proof.

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” – Blaise Pascal

Truer words have never been spoken.

“Because the scientific method is not developed through science, but rather through philosophy, science is a slave to philosophy. Bad philosophy results in bad science.” – Frank Turek

The scientific method is a method. You can’t “believe” or “disbelieve” a method.
It’s view events, form a hypothesis of cause and effect, form a theory as to why, test and observe, then accept or reject theory if it matches the objective data. Then have numerous other people do the same to validate the results.

If someone can find a better method to explain the natural world, be my guest.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=method
What about a method has anything to do with a philosophy? And since when does a “philosphy” bring about space travel, microbiotic medicine, cures for diseases, the means for deep sea travel….
The battle against scince, for some unknown reason, is a misguided attack against non-believers. It’s a straw-man tactic, and one that will ultimately fail.

(Added here in this reprint: ) Not to mention the fact that the observation of data, which is the core of the scientific method, is purely objective unlike philosophy. We don’t even have to rely on human eyes and ears any more. We have machines, instruments, devices which are incapable of adding subjectivity to observed data, doing the observations. If two different types of instruments come up with the exact same atomic weight for an element, then there you go. What’s freakin philisophical about that? THAT’s science.

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” – Charles Darwin

IF he actually DID say that (which I’m willing to believe), I fea that the quote is mentioned and likely misused in Frank Turek’s “Not Enough Faith to be an Atheist” book to help support a straw-man fallacy. That is to mischaracterize and misrepresent your opponent so that you can better refute it.

I’ve read several reviews of the book that state the entire foundation of the book is a straw-man arguement. It completely misunderstands the atheist thought-process and position. It builds the athiest position incorrectly so that it can tear it down easier.
One such way is the incorrect idea that atheists/evolutionists/whatever, believe that a highly complex amoeba that began the life generation of life spontaneous generated with encyclopedic genetic information.
Totally and completely false. No one in the legitimate scientific community or evolutionary science or biologist or paleoarchiologist or paleobiologist believes this is the case. The first single celled creature gradually developed over eons with constantly changing and growing chemical composition. It’s a very complex process that took eons of gradual hit-and-misses.

Slightly off the subject, but a good if not highly exaggerated version of the straw-man fallacy, during the 2004 Presidential race the Constitutional Party candidate has said in various high-school appearances “evolutionists want you to believe that your grandfather was a monkey and your great-grandfather was a fish. Can you really believe that?”
Granted I doubt (hope!) he wasn’t being literal, but he grossly mischaracterized his opposition in order to ridicule it.

Darwin said what he said because he was a good scientist. He realized that for science to be critical and viable it must be testable and subject to scrutiny! The method of science is to eliminate theories until one remains non-disproveable. (Unlike religion and philosophy where you start with a theory and then find data or ignore data or modify data which will support your theory.) He provided a means to test his theory.

And so far there has been no good disproval of his theory. All complex strutures from the eyeball to the single-celled amoeba can be explained with gradual developments and the coming together of already complex components. There are creatures alive today that have very primitive eye structures. Collections of photosensitive nerves which can detect the change and direction of light. It’s a protoeye that developed over time though genetic hit-and-misses, and combined with other genetic processes to make a new process.

There are evidence that biological structures that have one function may not have always had that function and have changed function to do something else. There can be very indirect evolutionary pathways which prevent us from making a direct and simplistic line backward.

All that notwithstanding, if Darwins theory of complexity were to be proven false, that does not wipe the entire field as false. Evolution does not cease to exist because one component of the theory is understood incorrectly.
2+2=4. 4 will always be four even if we misunderstand 2+2, as it might be 1+3.

I think one of the reasons fundamentalists are so tooth-and-nail and mischaracterize science as a philosophy, partly because they’re so scared for their own misapplied faith (and by that I do NOT mean mistaken belief in GOD! But rather the mistaken idea that faith should be used to explain the natural,) as over the centuries science has disproven concept after concept the fundamentalists belived in. Spontaneous generation, Earth centrism, 6000 year old Earth, creation in 6 days, etc.

I also think it comes from fear of the unknown in the realm of scientists. It takes a person YEARS of devoted study to just one field of science to understand it. A biologist isn’t a biologist after one semester of post highschool study. A biologist has to devote their life to years of study. Just to be a biologist. A palentobiologist even more different study. An exobiologist. A physicist. A quantum physicist. A cosmologist. A macrophysicist. Any of the hundreds of fields of study, it takes years to understand that field.
And yet ordinary people who are shop clerks, Web authors, preachers, insurance adjusters, factory workers, accountants, think they so understand one or all fields of study that they can refute it and disprove it by reading a book or two or pages of Web pages that amount to not much more than opinion stated as fact. It makes me sick, it really does.

And so people who are afraid of the fact that these people who spend years and years in study of science in order to find answers to our natural world, or find better ways to cure cancer, or develop new strains of wheat to feed starving countries, they mischaracterize them as labcoat wearing priests of a mysterious philosophy of Science. It’s the same thing that has made humans create hundreds, thousands of religions over the centuries: make explanations for things we don’t understand and mischaracterize and demonize the things we fear.

Afraid of oogly-boogly Science with their potions and concoctions and undecipherable figure and shapes and tomes of unapproachable knowledge, then make them into something they’re not in order to try to refute them and prop yourself up.

I’m really literally sick and tired of it. And I do mean literally.

I recently commented on a blog that included some line of reasoning taken from a book. It was kind of fun to blast it, although unfair. After all, it was just a snippet from an entire book!
But, I didn’t blast the book, in general anyway, I just focused on the line of reasoning it suggested.

Anyway, I used some explanations of fallacies and false logic based on my history with debate and, well, general search for ways to look at opinions presented as fact. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember some of them, so I did a little search, and woohoo! Found a couple of great sites. (Wish I had the Internet back in High School.)

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
and
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html
*sigh* Required disclaimer due to the above URL: Not only do I not endorse atheism, but I believe atheism to be just as foolish, shortsighted, ignorant, arrogant and self-righteous as the most religious fundamentalist. I simply heavily endorse the content of this particular Web page.

I recommend this to be required reading for everyone. Not just people who use the Internet, or people who want to make an argument, but EVERYONE! If everyone were more informed on ways in which they can be manipulated with purty words and “common sense” and false logic, then there would be a lot less ignorance, people being taken advantage of financially, physically, spiritually, ethically, religiously.

And it’s the responsibility of anyone trying to make an argument, in my opinion, to use rational, reasoned thought and not fall into the trap of false logic and fallacies of rhetoric and reasoning.

OK, watch this Flash video. Watch it carefully, read all you can, think about it. Whatever your political slant and belief, watch it all. And then be sure to come back here when you’re done. Watch it twice even.
Here it is:

http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon.php

Did you watch? Interesting, huh? Pretty convincing even. Or at least, maybe make you wonder pretty seriously?
OK, now read this:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html

Now what do you think?
See, the Flash image uses very sensationalized presentation to draw on emotion and gut feelings to elicit a pseudo-intellectual response. It uses assumption, LOTS of assumption, circuitous logic, spurious logic, and opinion presented as fact.
And it trusts that the “facts” will play off the viewer’s “common sense.” When you watched it, did you think to yourself, “of course! That makes perfect sense!”
Common sense is not perfect. It’s incredibly biased and prone to subjectivity, personal experience, and emotion.

Here’s another example.
The Kennedy assassination. What would you think if you saw the shirt and jacket JFK wore, and the autopsy report, all showing the entry wound in the back as being a few inches below the base of the skull, and about even with the exit wound?
“Holy cow!” you might say. “Common sense, logic for goodness sake, mandates that that means that shot was fired at street level! Not from the 6th story of a building!”

Now do this experiment. Place a clothing stay, a grommet, an ink spot on a suit jacket and a shirt and your skin in those same places. Now sit down, and raise your elbow the level, nearly 90-degrees, that Kennedy had his when he was shot. You’ll see that the clothing as well as your skin and muscle on your back will rise to above the level of the exit wound. An angle that would match someone 6 floors above the ground.

There’s the magic bullet. Logic, common sense, dictates that it’s impossible for a bullet to change direction twice, in mid-air even, and be able to pass through two torsos, an arm, and a leg, AND remain nearly pristine in appearance. Not possible. Not logical. Completely against common sense!

An experiment was recently carried out using a sharpshooter, the same model of rifle Oswald used, and a round from the exact same manufacturing batch Oswald got his ammo from. A company created exact replicas of Kennedy and the Texan Governor’s torsos, arm, and leg. Using materials that exactly matches human tissue, from skin to bone. They placed them in the exact same positions the were sitting and created the models using the exact same postures. Using some info not easily seen in film, and that is that the seat the Governor was sitting in was a modified “jump seat” which sits off-center from Kennedy’s. That plus the positions there were sitting in, in the film produced this:

That test round fired at exactly the same elevation and distance and angle made the exact same wounds in those models as were in Kennedy and the Governor. Exactly. Including the elongated entrance wound on the Governor’s back. The only difference is that the test round broke two of the model Governor’s ribs instead of one. So even though it exited, went through the model wrist the same way, when it hit the model thigh in the same place, it didn’t break the “skin.” But it did hit the same place. And the fact that it had slightly less velocity because of the 2nd rib means that in the Oswald shot it entered the Governor’s leg only superficially. Which explains why it had worked itself out and was found on the Governor’s hospital gurney.

And, the test round looked the exact same as the Oswald round. Perfect outer casing, very slight bend, and a little bit of the lead core pushed out the back.

Logic, common sense, can make us believe very wrong conclusions and it’s only through rational, critical, skeptical thought, analysis, research, and observation of data can the truth be revealed.

Some years ago I had a friend who was Wiccan. Her mom was Wiccan, her grandmother was…whatever “good” witches called themselves before Wicca was invented. Being open-minded and a friendly guy, I never scoffed at her beliefs, but one day it got too much for me. She’d made some comment about how majik (or however majick believers want to spell it) was just as legitimate and viable as science.

Ho boy!

So, I confirmed from her, the magic that Wicca, viz a vis, witchcraft, is based on has been around for centuries. It’s as old as the Celtic Druids, as the ancient Egyptians, yadda yadda. OK, so in all those centuries, how come there’s no PROOF that witchcraft works? No undeniable, empirical evidence that magick works? No one who can provide undeniable evidence that someone was turned into a toad, the exact future event was predicted, someone was spelled into loving another, etc. We’ve had centuries to come up with evidence and there is none.
Oh, she says, but it’s based on belief. On the power of belief and the force of spirit. (Everyone clap your hands and Tinkerbell will live!)
OK then, I say, you believe. You practice. You say it works. I’m willing to believe if I see it works. So do something to me. make my hair fall out. Foretell an exact event in my life and when it will happen down to the hour. Make my nose bigger or make it so that I will find an envelope of money at a specific place and time. Do anything, ANYTHING, that will provide undeniable proof that majiq was responsible for it happening. I will provide any body sample you need, my real name, the exact time and place of my birth. I would provide anything she needed.
Her response was to get mad at me.

See, if I want to make polymer strings, I know what chemicals I need to get and how to combine them and I will get plastic fibers every time. If I want to bake a cake, I know that the proper combination of starch, protein, and carbohydrates will produce the same effect. I know that if I mix carbon, ammonia, and salt peter together in a fine powder and apply heat I will get combustion. Science works. And every year science improves upon itself and works better, and more. (Unlike my grammar.)

But no matter how many centuries practitioners of mahjek have, they still cannot provide proof that it works. It doesn’t evolve, it doesn’t improve, it doesn’t progress. Scince has brought us from rural agrarians to the information age in 300 years. Magic has done nothing over 3000+ years but provide superstition and folklore.

And the basis for some cool movies.

Don’t just believe things because it Sounds Good. Because it strikes an emotional chord in you. Think about it rationally. Challenge it. Demand irrefutable proof. be a skeptic, and you won’t be a fool.