This is Freyr – if he takes your advice, he ought to go to WeHo! 
Would you be willing to e-mail Barb and me one of your cultural anth. papers on magic? I know we’d both love to read it, and might have some worthwhile comments (might even spark a GD thread!!). 
A YEAR? 250 a YEAR? chirst, even I can come up with that much money. Sell Plasma
Problem solved!
When I used to take the bus I noticed busses stopped running every 15 minutes at 5 at which point it was every half hour. At 7 it was every hour, and at 9 it was every 2.
Thats how it was where I lived anyway… Very inconvienent really.
{{{Freyr}}}
Man, I feel your pain.
I’m doing a master’s in entomology. I’m getting good and sick of sorting through dead bugs in antifreeze. (Gee–only about 2000 little bags of frozen dead beetles to go through! My, oh, my–how encouraging!) My social life is about on par with yours. A lot of the really worthwhile exchanges happen via my long-distance carrier. 
I know this isn’t much of a substitute, but feel free to e-mail me. I could use a new person to talk to, too.
**Rexdart wrote:
But they didn’t, so they couldn’t adequately explain the observable world, so they made up a pantheon of gods and various magical rituals and bloody sacrifices.**
Would you mind providing a cite for this? Every rationalist I’ve spoken to loves to quote James Frazier (author of The Golden Bough) without ever realizing his works is considered laughable in modern sociological/anthropological circles, the same way that geo-centric universe is in modern physics.
If someone wants to preserve his culture by continuing to practice the magical rituals of its past, well that’s one thing. But actually believing that the rituals will produce, by magic, the desired result is just ignorance.
You’re the one claiming magic doesn’t work. Would you mind backing that up with some reputable cites?
Cultural relativism is all well and good, but when it gets down to the level of facts there is such a thing as true and false, reality and illusion.
Yes, I agree with you here. There are also many different ways of viewing reality, one of which is thru the lense or rationalism. If you had bothered to read the book and article I pointed out above, you might have learned that different cultures have different ways of viewing reality which are not incongruous with our own, simply different.
Scribble & Balduran, thanks for the sympathetic thoughts. It’s nice to know I’m not alone in this. Thanks, guys! (or girls, as the case may be!)
Polycarp, as soon as I write the paper on magic, I’ll let you know. Right now, I’m simply working on the annotated bibliography for it. I do have a good paper on Satanism that you might be interested in. I’m banging it into shape for a conference in April. When it’s ready, I’ll email you a copy.
Harmonix the last bus in my area is the 234, which makes it’s last run by my house at 10:50PM, roughly. After than, nothing. And I can’t sell my plasma, since as a gay man, I’m consider at high risk for HIV (tho I’ve been consistently testing negative since 1986 )
WHAT???!!! You actually want to me to cite the fact that magic doesn’t work?? Ummm…are we living in the same universe here??
I’m yet to see or even hear of a magical ritual which produces in a well-designed experiment the results which it purports to. If magic “worked”, that would mean that a particular magical ritual would produce the same result on repeated occasions. This sort of thing can be tested. If somebody could do real magic, they’d have claimed Randi’s million dollar prize and went on their way. Or they would have otherwise made quite a name for themselves and drawn the attention that would validate or refute their assertions.
I can’t believe that on a board allegedly dedicated to “fighting ignorance” I’m actually sitting here faced with a demand to provide a citation to support the claim that magic doesn’t work. I’m at a loss for words here. Yes, there are different ways to view reality, but even this last century’s most noted antirealists wouldn’t go so far as to assert that magic works.
If you wanna take this to GD where we can do a good job on it, I’d be interested to see what happens. We could narrow the topic down to specific claims and take a good look at it. Until it’s narrowed down, I could throw a hundred cites out here about claims of magical powers being debunked and it wouldn’t help.