My opinion is that it is dichotomous. Not a dromedary curve but a bactrian curve. It’s really rare to find people who divide their thinking equally between rational and irrational.
But…I definitely agree that the curve is gradated. It would also be really rare to find anyone who only ever thinks rationally, without the least dollop of irrationality mixed in. (Or, God help us all, the opposite!)
Plenty of people CHOOSE to be stupid, about a great many things. Religionists are child molesters. They ruin kid’s minds before they are old enough to choose for themselves (to be fools).
I’m about as anti-religion as anyone can be, and even I don’t buy that garbage. This kind of extremism doesn’t advance the cause of rationality.
Magical thinking made it all possible too. They are ying and Yang. What we are doing right now is the magic of 20 years ago. We are living in a century that is magical to most of human history. People dreaming up things. There would be no art, no entertainment, life would be nasty brutish and if youre lucky, short.
Having imagination and being a dreamer are not the same as magical thinking. The people who invent and design modern technology don’t do it by prayer or wishing really hard and expecting that will make it happen. They do it by studying science and engineering and learning the foundational principles of the technology they’re working on. There’s nothing in any of that that is consistent with a belief that if they do x, then y will result despite a lack of evidence from reason or observation that it could.
This thread is intended to debate the values of various methods of thinking. If you have a need to just rant on religion, go open a new thread in the BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
I think the major problem with religions is the number of them. If there was only one religion, then you could perhaps justify your faith in it because it would obviously be special.
But in the real world we have hundreds of religions. The evidence supporting all of them is essentially the same. And belief in one generally requires disbelieving in all the others.
So a believer confronted with all these hundreds of religions rejects all of them as false except for one. That one he believes is the special one that happens to be true even though the evidence of its truth is no better than the evidence in support of all of the religions he rejected as false.
Everybody’s an atheist. It’s just that some people are 99.9% atheists and some people are 100% atheists.
As others have said, the primary benefit of logical thinking is that it works.
When it comes to “magical thinking”, my personal belief is that if you want to consider something lucky then go for it, because the placebo effect also works. Life is hard, and if seeing a rainbow or finding a penny on the sidewalk brightens someone’s day then that’s a benefit to them even if there’s no deeper meaning behind it. However, it’s important to guard against more harmful beliefs – you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you believe that some sign foretells bad luck, because the nocebo effect also works.
I’m not sure that we have a very good understanding of what “magical thinking” is supposed to refer to in this thread. For me, it conjures up (heh) the kind of thinking that is considered to be a sign or symptom of certain mental illnesses, or, sometimes, that of children.
Then there’s also the kind of thinking (which may or may not be entirely distinct) engaged in by some religious believers, as noted by other posters, or by practitioners in things like sympathetic magic, or believers in superstition.
I don’t think it’s possible to defend magical thinking as an overriding mode of thought, but one or two posters alluded to a potential increase in creativity as a result of magical thinking, and I agree with this. Being able to tap into that sort of thinking can provide for a nice creative boost, lateral problem-solving, and some beautiful artistic expression that can be quite pleasing and satisfying.
Being able to tap into that sort of thinking can also be of benefit from a personal psychological perspective. Some contend that our unconscious (or at least some of it) operates via magical thinking - I’m not convinced of that, but being aware of the underlying meanings expressed by one’s fantasy life, etc, which often can include magical thinking, can be quite illuminating.
Hey, don’t get binary on me dude.
Seriously you sound like a lot of laughs
Wait a minute. We have had science for a few hundred years, effectively. So that’s only .0001% of the life of humans.
We had trial and error and tools etc. but a lot of magic has been part of human life and development of society for so much longer than the scientific method. It worked for them in many different ways, up to today.
It worked for 500,000 years for them and they left the world in a habitable state for us to troll each other and generally jerk around and have a good time.
Are we, the runaway sons of the nuclear A bomb going to be so nice to the earth. Are we so wise? How many years do you give it til something big happens on the atomic clock. You are really so proud of your method that you have to call others mentally ill?
Do you have an actual rebuttal to make? You asserted “dreaming up things” is a form of magical thinking, and so technological advancement requires magical thinking as well as logical, rational thinking. I assert that “magical thinking” does not mean “dreaming up things”, and that no magical thinking is required to envision ways technology can be improved and to work to improve it. If you have evidence that “dreaming up things” involves magical thinking, by all means, present it. Because your “witty” little barb against my personality is of no interest to me.
Magic didn’t work for our ancestors. Magic doesn’t work for us. Magic doesn’t work.
Magic is for people that would rather have a simple wrong answer than a difficult correct answer.
If there’s ever another atomic war, you can bet that somebody who started it was using magical thinking.
Logic leads to computers, space flight, medicine that works (and indeed everything that works.)
a) You start with belief, then have to deny everything that doesn’t support it.
b) They contradict each other (and there’s no evidence to help you decide which, if any, are true.)
You don’t need insurance, because you can pray to God that nothing happens to your house / car / family.
You don’t need to save money, because you’ll win the Lottery.
You don’t need medical treatment, because God will cure you.
You don’t need to plan ahead, because psychics will tell you what to do.
Many here are pathologizing magical thinking, which is simply a part of life and the way the mind works.
The reason nuclear weapons are a problem is that there are perfectly logical reasons why humans get into the situation where they use them. It won’t be a lunatic who presses the button. I wish that were so.
Okay, drad, we’ll tell you what you want to hear. Science is evil. Magic is real. Pixies are going to solve all of your problems in life. So go out there and start making wishes.
Way to discuss, dude!
Posting on here is magical thinking. We’re all in the venn diagram. You think you’re not apparently.
That’s true of certain kinds of magical thinking too, though.
For example, I know a lot of people who put their faith in Christ, live by their creed, and it definitely works for them. They have rich, fulfilled lives. IMHO, it’s based on an imaginary friend, but it works. For them. I tried; it didn’t work for me.
The thing that’s special about rational thinking is that it works for everyone who does it right. Now, maybe I wasn’t “doing it right” when I tried my bout of magical living. Well, at least there’s a lot of very good guidebooks for rational thinking.
The Bible says that faith is open to all who seek it. It’s simply incorrect in that regard.
You can’t separate the world into “wrong” magical thinking and '“great” visionary, creative thinking. At the very least if you do that you are ending the discussion before it begins. You have defined it as undiscussable. Whereas to me it is gray areas, all of it.
If you define magical thinking as unproductive then you are making dichotomies that are false IMO.
All artists, and creators, as well as madmen have magical thoughts that are not completely rational. Noone is completely rational who is human. The more you trumpet that you are the more irrational you sound.
Meditation, which is as old as human history, and as new as multitudes of people doing it right now, has a lot to do with letting go of clinging to discursive thought. is that crazy? Unreal? a failure?
Magical thought is not hostile to science.
Works the other way around, too: picture a guy who isn’t imaginative or entertaining or inventive, but who uses magical thinking for purely mundane ends: he just wishes for – I dunno, lots of cash, plus maybe that his cute co-worker will ask him out, or something? Other thinkers are creative and logical; his thinking is – dull and magical?