At least witches aren’t angling for a theocracy.
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TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoIs it though…? As stupid as the Abrahamic God is, at least you have a “God of the Gaps” thing going on where all God really has to be is someone with their own agency to grant you what you ask for and to determine where to place you in an untestable “afterlife”. Of course there’s an obvious cocktail of inherent contradictions when you choose “omniscient”, “omnipotent”, and “omnibenevolent” at the same time, but then you can appeal to the idea we wouldn’t possibly understand the whims of such a god outside of time and space. Again, stupid as fuck, but you can weasel your way out of anything.
But witchcraft? Okay, you’re transferring the agency to yourself, and you’re saying you can perform magic, but now you have no evidence you’re capable of jack shit and you have no excuse to pawn it off onto. You’ll never be able to do magic your entire life because it categorically isn’t real, so is the excuse that witches are real but you personally really suck as one? Is the idea that you do what “God” does and take credit for anything that vaguely “works” by sheer coincidence and ignore everything else? Do you only cast “spells” that function as placebos like easing someone’s pain or making them feel happy – similar to many prayers?
So now you’ve gone from untestable woo like the afterlife and testable but weaselable woo like prayers to woo that you should absolutely be able to test empirically because you’re in control of it.
Feyd@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Sure. Doesn’t make them not stupid as hell; it just makes their beliefs less corrosive to society. I can imagine they’d be extremely toxic if they had widespread public support, but probably still not nearly as much as “I commune with an all-powerful sky daddy whose word is ultimate law that divides people between everlasting bliss and everlasting suffering and I can choose to believe whatever that word is” like Abrahamic religions.
Feyd@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Sure. I think anything that encourages people to believe things that they want to instead of because they’re true opens the way for them to apply that blind faith in other things that matter more, like politics. I do think organized religion is a bit worse because it also teaches subservience to undeserved authority.
Anyway, in the end, I’m waaay more worried about the one that is organized and has power than the people that aren’t bothering anybody and my opinions will reflect that.
Cruxifux@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Sure but I’m not really interested in playing whataboutism games when we are talking about two different types of make believe.
Feyd@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Then don’t try to paint one as somehow more respectable? Or better yet just don’t respond to a comment if you don’t want to follow a side conversation? What a weird reply
Cruxifux@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
I definitely think witchcraft is more respectable than Christianity, I wasn’t trying to paint it otherwise and I don’t see how you could take what I said as that. But whatever if you’re mad at me just cast a curse on me or whatever and I won’t hold it against you.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Prayers and spells are exactly the same behavior, a ritual for asking greater powers to intercede on your behalf. For people who genuinely believe in it there’s always some “works in mysterious ways” shit to justify when the thing they asked for never happens so they can keep believing it anyway, and as long as they ask in a vague enough way and on a vague enough timeline something will eventually happen that fits the bill close enough for them to call it a success. For people who don’t believe it literally but still participate it’s basically just ritualized affirmation, a self pep talk to make them feel more confident or prepared or calm using religious/occult symbolism to psychologically reinforce the effect.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, and what I think you missed is that I’m saying there are far fewer excuses for spells than there are for prayers. If we think of a prayer or spell like a transmission, that one starts and ends in our reality but can’t be measured by science is (even) dumber than one that starts above our reality by an omnipotent, hyperdimensional trickster set on not revealing itself.
A prayer means that someone else – infinitely wiser and outside time and space – will do this for you if they so choose. From this, you have near-infinite freedom to weasel around why your prayer was or wasn’t answered. You’ve made it unfalsifiable, which is intellectual sludge, but it means you’ve insulated yourself from being provably wrong.
But for “witchcraft”? Yes, this particular brand of delusion often turns to weasel spells (whereas I used to see a lot more of “I can do concrete, measurable things that couldn’t happen otherwise”), but given they’re making the action happen or creating a conduit for that action, there ought to be some physically observable explanation behind it. But apparently magic can interface with patterns of candles and lavendar and minerals and clockwise tea set up by some early 20s stoner in their parents’ basement but can’t be measured by science.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Literally every single excuse for prayers not working can be employed for spells not working just as effectively, no modification required
Feyd@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
The mechanism in both cases is that the practitioner does ritual and stuff happens because magic. Who gives a fuck what the magic is???
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Except it categorically isn’t. If you sit two people in a laboratory – an adherent to an Abrahamic religion and a “practitioner” of “magic” – neither will be able to perform a supernatural feat. We agree that far. But unless the “witch” wants to resort to special pleading that they can’t perform it under laboratory conditions for no good reason (the woo magic system presumably isn’t sentient and has no reason to care? or maybe they have really bad performance anxiety?), then it’s provably false. Even if they say something vague like “better luck” or “better health”, well we have statistics for a reason. Are you not powerful enough? Okay, well like, we’re measuring down to the attometer at this point. If you want to drink masala chai under an amber calcite chandelier of 100 candles drinking masala chai and listening to pagan-coded fantasy music, and you can consistently, measurably move a human hair 20 meters away, congratulations: you’ve still proven witchcraft is real.
The Abrahamic God, meanwhile, is constructed to be unfalsifiable. It’d be subject to everything I just mentioned except that there are a million bullshit but unfalsifiable rationalizations why a sentient God wouldn’t respond to these prayers to let them be observed. Literally no matter how hard you try, a sentient third-party gets the final say.
The difference between believing in a monotheistic God and believing in witchcraft is the difference between believing in Santa Claus and believing you made and placed those presents yourself. Of course neither is true and both are ridiculous: there is another entity putting those presents there, but it’s not magic, and by taking action in the real world, you can influence what those presents will be without magic.