Ehhhh. Haven’t you heard that the gods help those who help themselves? 
The last time Iwas caught helping myself i ended up in court.
Okay, if you go out today and snap the necks of seven children under the age of three you’ll live forever. Still sound like a good idea? What if you could do it without getting caught–is the extension of YOUR life worth the truncating of theirs? Some things aren’t worth the price. Wiccans follow the Threefold Rule–that everything you do comes back to you three times over. Send out good, get back three times the good. Send out evil, get back three times the evil. At no time does any Wiccan or pagan say you CAN’T do something, because you’re a sovereign being and you absolutely have the right to do whatever the hell you want–but are you prepared to pay the price? I’ve chosen to be the instrument of karma on many occasions, with my eyes open to the cost I was incurring personally but I believed and still do that the price is worth it because of the evil I prevented. Live with a viewpoint like that for a while and you become much less of an activist about many things I’ve noticed.
The kami are always there–the word means “breath” or “spirit,” and it doesn’t appear or go away at my bidding. However, for the purposes of focusing my intent and/or dealing with the inherent cussedness of the world it helps to personify little bits of the world, make them more definable to me. The invoking and dispelling is purely in my mind, it’s my way of visualizing my intent. That being said, there is a small god of car starters I invoke whenever I turn the key. That one is very real!
Well, Clarke’s Law tells us that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and as we learn more about how the world works our machines become smaller, more efficient and much less machine-like. Nanotechnology is becoming a reality, and that’s basically creating a live machine to do something specific that we want accomplished, preferably on its own, in perpetuity, without further instruction. This is not a demon in what way?
Also, specific to quantum physics there’s the whole Heisenberg thing where simply observing something, subjecting it only to your attention and will, changes it. This isn’t “magic?” Hang another label on it if you like, but if you can effect a change on the universe merely by looking at it there’s nothing that says you can’t effect even greater changes by putting more attention and will into it. Scientific method and rules of magic concur–as above, so below. Magic is science without having to build intervening machinery…
So if I understand correctly, you are not suggesting that there are actual ‘living’ spirits inhabiting the world around us, which are capable of doing things. Rather, what you describe is a way of momentarily imagining such spirits to exist, and thereby make oneself feel better about thing working out the way they do. For example saying “Come on, start!” while cranking a balky car on a cold day. Am I getting you right?
Oh for the love of Mike!
Yup!
Well, see, it’s hard to say really. See, the skeptic in me balks at thinking of live, conscious beings inhabiting what seem to me to be inanimate objects. Then I start thinking it through and I have to admit that animals are thinking, feeling creatures that I can interact with and in some cases have language in common with. Then I have to ask myself, how can I really judge the consciousness of a tree? They live so long and their lives move so slowly that they could be completely self aware and have language but I move so quickly that I couldn’t possibly even sit still long enough for a tree to notice my existence. Then I have to admit to myself that the plants I grow in my garden are fundamentally just very fast living trees and as such might also share a consciousness I’m not equipped to perceive. Rocks are harder to empathize with, but I feel a kinship with certain rocks, certain mountains, certain pieces of landscape that for me transcend their scenery–how do I really know what’s going on there that makes THAT particular place a hallowed and special place when another place that seems ostensibly similar doesn’t have the same transcendent feel? The earth itself, such an amazingly complex yet brutal piece of machinery it is–do I really know whether or not the aggregate of the earth, with all the living creatures on it isn’t in itself an organism connected with the even greater body and communicating with it constantly?
It seems to me, given all this body of available awareness and acutely aware of my own limitations in sensory equipment and understanding, that the best approach is to be respectful of all the little bits and pieces around me, assuming that they all have their place, their part and their own sets of needs and desires and try not to automatically place my wants higher than everything around me. That’s just good manners, seems to me. So if I need to take branches from a tree for my own reasons, I should be aware that I might be causing a damage and at least be mindful and respectful, just in case. It doesn’t hurt me a bit to be mindful, and in fact it does me a lot of good, spiritually speaking, since it’s smart to be aware of your place in the world–including how very small that really is. Perspective is good.
My husband wishes to add (after I read the above to him) that he absolutely knows that computers have become imbued with their own very specific kami and I tend to agree with him. He says he thinks they’re diabolical, possibly malicious and if they learn to work together we’d all better look out. Having watched a terminally BSODing computer suddenly pull out of it and behave after he gets his hands on it (literally, a “laying on of hands”) I’m hard pressed to gainsay him. I think the things we make take a bit of the kami of their builders and as such they seem uniquely able to either aid us or frustrate us depending on our relationships to them. Cars now, they’re very alive or at least mine are. I only keep the ones who like me, and have sold cars that made me uneasy. Is that “magic,” or am I just very sensitive to very small indicators that the machinery isn’t all it could be? When I talk to my cars and problems “heal” themselves long enough to get me to a safe place, is it magic? Probably not, but pagans and Wiccans are total pragmatists, really, and if the outcome is good who cares if you can prove whether what you did “worked” or not? Does it matter in the long run? I think of magic as another form of meditation–it’s good for my head and it doesn’t hurt anybody.
Pompeii
Old West Ghost Towns
Tokyo after Godzilla
Zimbabwe
When do I get my pizza?
For what it is worth, I’d like to share my opinion as a former neopagan and current skeptic.
The lack of scientific belief and the absolute pervasiveness of ridiculous magickal thinking absolutely turned me off from most neopagan sects even when I was a neopagan. I considered myself an independent practictioner of the ancient Celtic faith, and strongly disliked most uses of ancient Celtic gods and religion as I found them laughably historically inaccurate. I spent much of my spare time reading historical texts, rather than neopagan texts, because I found them more reliable; my goal was (as was possible) reconstructionary, and I found most neopagans who talked about the Celtic gods and goddesses really had no idea of their cultural context. They could rattle of names of the gods of this-and-that but didn’t know the myths and legends, and often shoe-horned Celtic theology into the Wiccan mold (all goddesses are one Goddess type stuff, which just isn’t present originally).
I bought a few books from modern druids and Celtic practitioners and even attended a druidic ceremony once but never felt any real kinship with those people. Even when they did actually spend some time learning about the history, it was with a lack of any reasonable skepticism. Any story, no matter how unlikely, was grasped as fact if it was convenient. I thought it was the same type of thinking that turned me away from Christianity. At the time I also thought it was rather patronizing to my intelligence (and to the intelligence of historical practictioners) as well.
Ultimately I found that while I really wanted to believe that I had this connection to the past, it was more wishful thinking than anything. I still greatly love Celtic history and I desperately regret how little we understand of the religion now, thanks largely to Julius Caesar and St. Patrick. I think it was a valuable experience to explore new ideas and ways of thinking, but I don’t really believe the gods exist or that my religious experiences were at all real.
I do like Sunspace’s idea of being a secular neopagan… if I could “pick” a religion, it would still be it, but I just don’t believe. I don’t pretend that the historical teaching largely wouldn’t be acceptable by modern standards, but I do like to imagine what it would be like if the druids were still kicking around today, and how their worldview would adapt to new science. They were, after all, very interested in observing the natural world. I’d like to think the spirit of science has roots in ancient religions that worshipped nature. We modern folks don’t see a link between astronomy and religious observance, but they sure did.
I would think that I would receive divine punishment in exact proportion to the crime (although that does necessarily mean identical suffering, just proportionate suffering.). However, if I got away with it, I wouldn’t expect to have bad things happen to me in life, only after death. And I think the idea that it would be exactly thrice the amount is a bit silly (as in, why three and not the square root of ten?).
Well, I don’t believe that God explicitly designed people to be the way we are. We just happened to come down from the trees that way, and many of our natural instincts are dead wrong. The only part where I think God comes in is in judging the souls of morally culpable beings, of which humans are the only ones currently known to exist.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: A lot of people describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” I think I’m “religious, but not spiritual,” because I’ve never believed in miracles or magic or luck or the idea that everything always turns out for the best, and I’ve never felt the need for rituals or meditation or being “in harmony with nature”. I’m not saying the people who do get benefits from that are bad or stupid, but it does not appeal to me.
The number is, of course, completely silly and arbitrary. That’s one of those “better taken as a metaphor” things that I think people get caught up in as if it’s real. It’s not real, it’s poetry.
What is real is that the “energy” you put out, to some extent, affects those around you and tends to make them treat you the same way that you treat them. The simplest way to see this is to go out and be grumpy. Bump into people, bark at them, scowl and avoid eye contact. Not only do they act surly to you in return, but most of the time you start to actually feel surly, even if you were only faking it for your experiment. You’ve created that change in accordance with your will and you’re receiving the same negative energy you put out, reflected back at you and generally magnified (we won’t bother to quantify it.)
Same thing if you go out and smile, make eye contact and compliment people you meet. You’ll get back smiles, you’ll find people doing you favors and you’ll very likely find yourself in a great mood even if you weren’t in one to start. You’ve sent out and gathered in “good” energy in return.
Where this all falls down, of course, is that in real life, especially in business, assholes get wildly successful and saints starve. My personal theory is that they’re drawing on the “karmic” credit acount and sucking “good” from the environment and other people around them, they’re not really breaking this rule of nature. But it can be awfully hard to see sometimes, just like it’s hard to get your head around the amount of borrowed energy you’re using to move a car when it comes as gasoline and not pushing with your legs. Still, it’s undeniable that some people live fabulously wealthy and happy productive lives even when they’re unethical bastards. Life isn’t fair.
The Rule of Three can be a good thing to keep in mind when deciding if or when to act, and it can stay the hand of a hasty magician and encourage one to think of possible consequences of her actions. But it’s not a moral absolute.
So then, you believe you can go kill seven innocent children in exchange for an indefinitely extended lifetime, but you think your only punishment for that would be posthumous? How… convenient. :dubious: Your god would let you go on indefinitely without retribution after something so heinous and it wouldn’t even affect your life? Then after you die you get nailed in the ass with neverending torment? Your god would really suck at training puppies, is all I have to say.
As for the Threefold Rule, you’re showing your Christian roots in being all precise and stuff. It has nothing to do with exact meting out of this[sup]3/sup because of that(action.) Wiccans are in no way so exact! All it’s saying is that you WILL have consequences for ALL your actions, whether for good or ill and that you reap more than you sow–nature even shows us this. Plant ONE little zucchini seed and get a Field of Mutant Zeppelins–not proportionate, true, but that’s the way life is.
Our natural instincts are never either right or wrong, merely effective or ineffective or perhaps convenient or inconvenient. There’s nothing of morality about what the animal wants and needs, only how the animal goes about getting its needs met. Christian religion is all about imposing an external framework to control the inner beast, when all good money is on just learning how to come to an accomodation between our baser and more elevated desires.
Sounds to me like you’re all about the rules, but don’t care about the law. I’m just the opposite–rules are transient, law is forever.
I’m not false, just apathetic 
ETA: nor am I all powerful, and I never claimed to be, cause then people would like, expect me to do stuff
Yep, and I agree with you on every point here. Clarke’s Law, especially, is something that immediately comes to mind when thinking about/discussing magic, and especially when coming across people who declare that science and spirituality are fundamentally contradictory ideas. I don’t believe that they are contradictory, obviously.
It also brings to mind all the stuff I’ve been hearing lately about how two quantum particles can be “connected” and affect each other regardless of distance. Change the spin on one, and the other changes, even if the other is miles or light-years away, with no obvious physical connection between the two. Sounds like magic to me; and I have a strong sense that whenever we get to a point of really starting to understand how quantum physics works, we’ll have the beginnings of an understanding of how magic works. For the moment, in both arenas, in large part we only know that it does work and we haven’t quite figured out the “how”. There’s a lot more discovery to be made here.
My point was more along the lines in which the deity was the dude who put us in the trees in the first place.
If you have a god who is not only intelligent, but all-knowing and all-powerful, then it is perfectly capable of designing a system, and setting it in motion, such that he knows exactly how the entire system will proceed from there. There was a point where this system, the Universe, was an act of will, and beyond that point no further “design” or intervention is needed, but things will still proceed exactly as this god intended them to.
So in other words, if this god would prefer humans that (to use a common but silly example) have virtually no sex drive, he could have designed the system (the Universe and the laws of physics) to lead to that end result from the very start. An all-knowing god knows where humans are going to end up at this point in time once the system is set in motion. Getting pissy at us for ending up where he knew we would sounds more like a toddler than a god.
This, and this is where the rede (“Harm none, do as ye will”) comes in. Wrongness comes about from someone getting harmed. Beyond that, judgment into right/wrong becomes non-sensical (to me and to many others). If you say pre-marital sex is wrong, I ask you why is it wrong? If both parties consent, and want it, and derive happiness from it, and they act responsibly enough that they don’t end up with a disease or child they don’t want (or, alternately, are doing it because they do want a child that they’re planning to take care of), what about it is wrong, and why? Every single reason I can think of that would make the act wrong, comes down to someone, somewhere, getting hurt. If no one gets hurt, I’m just not grokking what’s wrong about it.
This is an excellent way to put it.