Theism, magical thinking and CAM.

[floppit]

I see magical thinking and theism in the same category - they are, just as many aspects of CAM; however to those that believe I'm not sure they involve the same thought processes.

Theism is clearly magical, as magical as unicorns and fairies - belief in what cannot be seen via received wisdom from others. Yet, I've never met a theist that acknowledges theism as magical (magic may exist theoretically just as...). Same with those who are superstitious, the one's I've met talk as if there is a material link between the ladder walked under and the future, there seems no self awareness that it is magical thinking.

CAM - I think this is slightly different with a mixture of the above and a great many followers who just CANNOT distinguish it from tested medicine, people that simply do not understand why anecdote is not as convincing as double blind trials! I would accept that while grossly incorrect this does not have to be magical thinking, just boringly wrong.

So here's my question - how do theists avoid becoming aware that their beliefs are magical? I was once a theist, many moons ago and obviously failed to avoid such an awareness - ergo by my teens atheism was in the ascent!

Am I just wrong, do most theists accept it is magical thinking but that the magic exists?

[Clinton Huxley]

It's a "different way of knowing", whatever that means.

[Animavore]

Nietzsche, as always, owns on the topic of magical thinking.

Origin of religious worship. If we imagine ourselves back in the times when religious life was in fullest flower, we find a fundamental conviction which we no longer share, and because of which we see the gates to the religious life closed to us once and for all: it concerns nature and our interaction with it. People in those times do not yet know anything of natural laws; neither for the earth nor for the heavens is there a "must": a season, the sunshine; the rain can come, or also fail to appear. There is no concept whatsoever of natural causality. When one rows, it is not the rowing that moves the ship; rather rowing is simply a magical ceremony by which one compels a demon to move it. All illnesses, death itself, are the result of magical influences. There is never anything natural about becoming ill or dying; the whole idea of a "natural development" is lacking (it first begins to dawn on the older Greeks, that is, in a very late phase of mankind, with the conception of a moira9 which reigned over the gods). When someone shoots with bow and arrow, an irrational hand and strength is always at work; if springs suddenly dry up, one thinks first of subterranean demons and their mischief; it has to be the arrow of a god whose invisible influence causes a man to drop suddenly. In India (according to Lubbock),10 a carpenter makes sacrifices to his hammer, his axe, and his other tools; in the same way does a Brahman handle the pencil with which he writes, a soldier his weapons of battle, a mason his trowel, a worker his plow. In the mind of religious men, all nature is the sum of the actions of conscious and intentioned beings, an enormous complex of arbitrary acts. There is nothing outside ourselves about which we are allowed to conclude that it will become thus and so, must be thus and so: we ourselves are what is more or less certain, calculable. Man is the rule, nature without rule: in this tenet lies the basic conviction that governs primitive, religiously productive ancient cultures. We present-day men experience precisely the reverse: the richer a man feels inwardly, the more polyphonic he is as a subject, the more powerfully nature's symmetry affects him. With Goethe, we all recognize in nature the great means of soothing the modern soul;11; we hear the stroke of the greatest clock with a longing to rest, to become settled and still, as if we could drink this symmetry into ourselves, and thus come finally to an enjoyment of our own selves. Formerly it was the reverse: if we think back to primitive, early tribal states, or if we closely observe present-day savages, we find them most strongly directed by law, tradition: the individual is almost automatically bound to it, and moves with the uniformity of a pendulum. To him nature--uncomprehended, frightful, mysterious nature--must seem to be the realm of freedom, of choice, of a higher power, a seemingly superhuman level of existence, a god. Now, every individual in those times and conditions feels that his existence, his happiness, that of his family, the state, the success of all enterprises, depends on those arbitrary acts of nature: some natural events must take place at the right time, others must fail to take place. How can one exercise an influence on these terrible unknowns? How can one bind the realm of freedom? The individual wonders and asks himself anxiously: "Is there no means, through tradition and law, to make those powers as governed by rule as you are yourself`?"
The thinking of men who believe in magic and miracles is bent on imposing a law on nature; and in short, religious worship is the result of this thinking. The problem that those men set themselves is most closely related to this one: how can the weaker tribe nevertheless dictate laws to the stronger, direct it, and guide its actions (as they relate to the weaker tribe)? At first one will be reminded of the most harmless kind of pressure, that pressure one exerts when one has courted someone's affections. By entreaties and prayers, by submissiveness, by committing oneself to regular tributes and gifts, by flattering glorifications, it is also possible to exert pressure on the forces of nature, by making them favorably inclined: love binds and is bound. Then one can seal contracts, by which one commits oneself reciprocally to certain behavior, puts up pledges and exchanges vows. But much more important is a kind of more powerful pressure through magic. Just as man knows how to use the help of a magician to hurt a stronger enemy and keep him afraid, just as love spells are effective from afar, so the weaker man believes he can also direct the more powerful spirits of nature. The main means of all magic is to gain power over something that belongs to the other, hair, nails, some food from his table, even his picture or his name. With such apparatus one can then proceed to do magic, for the basic assumption is that there is something physical to everything spiritual; with its help one can bind the spirit, harm it, destroy it. The physical furnishes the ways and means by which to catch the spiritual. Just as man now directs man, so he also directs some one spirit of nature; for the spirit too has its physical aspect, by which it can be caught. The tree and, compared with it, the seed from which it sprang: this puzzling juxtaposition seems to prove that one and the same spirit is embedded in both forms, now little, now big. A stone that starts to roll suddenly is the body in which a spirit acts; if there is a block of stone lying on a lonely heath, it seems impossible that human strength should have brought it there; thus the stone must have moved itself there, that is, it must be housing a spirit. Everything that has a body is accessible to magic, including spirits of nature. If a god is virtually bound to his image, then one can also exert direct pressure against him (by refusing him sacrificial nourishment, by flagellation, enchainment and the like). To exact the wanting favor of their god, who has left them in the lurch, the humble people in China entwine his image with rope, tear it down, drag it in the streets through heaps of mud and dung: "You dog of a spirit," they say, "we let you dwell in a splendid temple, we covered you prettily in gold, fed you well, sacrificed to you, and yet you are so ungrateful" In Catholic lands, similar violent measures have also been taken during this century against images of saints or of the Virgin Mary when during plagues or droughts, for example, they did not want to do their duty.
All these magical relationships to nature have called into being countless ceremonies; finally when the confusion of them has grown too great, one tries to order them, systematize them, so that one thinks he is guaranteeing the favorable course of the whole process of nature, particularly the great cycle of the seasons, by a parallel course of a system of proceedings. The meaning of religious worship is to direct nature, and cast a spell on her to human advantage, that is, to impose a lawfulness on her, which she does not have at the start; whereas in present times, man wishes to understand the lawfulness of nature in order to submit to it. In short, religious worship is based on ideas of magic between man and man; and the magician is older than the priest. But it is likewise based on other and more noble ideas; it presumes a sympathetic relationship of man to man, the existence of goodwill, gratitude, hearing supplicants, of contracts between enemies, of bestowal of pledges, of demand for protection of property. Even in very primitive stages of culture, man does not confront nature as a powerless slave, he is not necessarily her involuntary servant: in the Greek stage of religion, especially in the relationship to the Olympian gods, there is the thought of a coexistence of two castes, one nobler and more powerful, the other less noble; but according to their origin both belong together somehow and are of one kind; they need not be ashamed before one another. That is the noble element in Greek religiosity.

[Rum]

I am not sure that the issue is as you frame it Floppit. It is maybe more helpful to remember that the early Christians were very keen to stamp out the 'pagan' religions and all that was associated with them, including magic and witchcraft. I suspect that as the Christian belief system consolidated and became a hegemony which swamped every other belief system in Europe, it simply became 'normal' and the other belief systems were demonised. Magic became 'evil' and the spawn of the devil as it faded into the past, forgotten fragments of the old religions.

[floppit]

It's a "different way of knowing", whatever that means.

Perhaps that's it, maybe it is more like CAM than I give it credit for. Do you think it comes from not understanding that our internal emotions, feelings, senses are NOT evidence in their own right? Don't get me wrong I think all those things have there place, but they could not replace drug trials for example. I wonder if theists believe they could? Perhaps the distinction between the two types of 'evidence' just doesn't exist to them?

[floppit]

I am not sure that the issue is as you frame it Floppit. It is maybe more helpful to remember that the early Christians were very keen to stamp out the 'pagan' religions and all that was associated with them, including magic and witchcraft. I suspect that as the Christian belief system consolidated and became a hegemony which swamped every other belief system in Europe, it simply became 'normal' and the other belief systems were demonised. Magic became 'evil' and the spawn of the devil as it faded into the past, forgotten fragments of the old religions.

I'm not sure I know what you mean but I agree with what you've said. I took it as read that all religions involve magic.

[Clinton Huxley]

Maybe such people have greater powers of cognitive dissonance and are more able to hold mutually-contradictory points of view than the average rationalist...

[floppit]

To exact the wanting favor of their god, who has left them in the lurch, the humble people in China entwine his image with rope, tear it down, drag it in the streets through heaps of mud and dung: "You dog of a spirit," they say, "we let you dwell in a splendid temple, we covered you prettily in gold, fed you well, sacrificed to you, and yet you are so ungrateful"

[Animavore]

I just read that yesterday and it was so awesome I just had to try fit it in some where

[floppit]

I just read that yesterday and it was so awesome I just had to try fit it in some where

I kept thinking of the Pope!

[bhakta]

Seem to recall someone putting forward a hypothesis that magical thinking , theism and I guess CAM are part of the same personality trait for "suggestibility" which may confer survival advantage given the powerful effect of placebo for individual survival given the historic and in many places continued absence of scientific health care. I guess this would also impact social cohesion where people and perhaps kinships who most feared their "Gods" behaved in accordance with the deities perceived will. I guess such a suggestibility trait would have variable expression, some of us get a big dose and others, the innate rationalists, none?

[The Dawktor]

I tend to view:

Supplements
Complimentary &
Alternative
Medicine

as a tax on scientific ignorance. That people pay with their cash or (sometimes) with their lives

[floppit]

I tend to view:

Supplements
Complimentary &
Alternative
Medicine

as a tax on scientific ignorance. That people pay with their cash or (sometimes) with their lives

Bit off topic but I once knew a very stupid horse owner who paid for the services of a horse psychic (not a psychic horse - although arguably she'd have been better off, as would the horse). The psychic told her the horse was depressed and scared of leaving his stable, he said trying to work it was cruel. As the owner was the pragmatic sort, she had the horse shot!

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Though you raise some interesting arguments, I find it hard to see any connection between religion, superstition and Crassulacean acid metabolism.

However, I will add that I disagree with Rum. Magical thinking was not stamped out under the rise of christianity, it was subsumed. Magic became the sole preserve of jeebus and those 'holy' enough to be gifted that power by him. Miracles, prophecies, 'signs', exorcisms, transubstantiations, faith healing, 'the power of prayer', saintly intercession - all of these are examples of magical thinking routinely accepted as fact by most believers as recently as a century ago and by a substantial minority even now.

As Rum mentioned, other magic - ie. anything that was not ultimately credited to jeebus - was demonised and deemed to be the work of the deVille. What I don't see (from what I know of religious history) is any dip in the belief in such things - possibly even the contrary is true.

[Bruce Burleson]

Well, hell, as a theist who occasionally frequents these environs, I suppose I am obligated to respond. For me, the whole thing boils down to personal experience. Since I think that I experience the presence of God in my own life, there is nothing magical about the idea. It seems to be a real experience. It has nothing to do with dogma or the church or doctrine. I experience steak, and lo, steak is there. I experience wine, and lo, wine is there. I experience sex, and lo, Paraguayan cheerleaders are there. I experience God, and lo, ....... you get the picture.

Anyway, that's my two cents.