I can’t wait for the threads about fairies, leprechauns, gnomes, and Santa Claus.
Close to this. Transformation is mostly symbolic but a man can display practically any unique behavior in other animals by “being one.” Unsophisticated observers can confuse mental and cultural oddness with physical abnormalities. The various epics and legends tell of heroes momentarily transformed into ferocious beasts in the heat of battle. When the heat cools down, he’s back to being an “ordinary” man all covered with blood and gore. That alone will explain the abundance of literature, both plausible and far fetched, concerning the subject.
So kids, if you wanna be a werewolf it’s easy but it entails maiming and murder. Develop a lust for blood and gore. Have your friends videotape you. See how convincing you look. If you don’t, keep practicing.
I think it serves more as a condemnation of the validity of torture as an interrogation technique. Chances are that by the time they were done, the guy was ready to confess to being Mary, Queen of Scots. His sentence probably would have been the same, though.
Becoming a Monty Python skit?
Why do you have to disprove this to them? They are the ones making an incredible claim, not you-proof is their burden, not yours.
Fight your ignorance, not those in others.
Reading these short accounts, it seems that what was witnessed was a killer wolf (Gilles Garnier, Greifswald, Ansbach…) or a human murderer (Chalons). In some of these cases, someone admited to be a werewolf presumably under torture. In others, it was just assumed that the wolf was in fact a werewolf.
So even assuming that these accounts are perfectly reliable, most of them don’t even contain evidences of the existence of werewolves. In only two of these cases, there’s a witness of something supernatural (the transformation). That’s the best they can do by digging into centuries old weird tales?
I couldn’t find a more detailled account in French about the werewolves of Poligny, weirdly enough (not that I spent a long time searching). However I noticed that in this case, the victims were murdered with knives, and two guys confessed to being werewolves. Werewolves killing with knives? That’s the most notable and difficult to explain example? Paint me unimpressed.
Hell is the impossibility of werewolves.
14-18 years old you say?
Well if they aren’t using werewolves as a metaphor for the angst and pain of puberty and adolescence and grow out of it by 20, I’ll eat my hat, and any other head-covering anyone would care to donate.
A while back I saw a movie called Werewolves: The Dark Survivors. It was a fake documentary, kind of like Mermaids: The Body Found. It was hooey from start to finish, but somebody took the trouble to at least try to make it sound plausible. No, people didn’t actually switch into wolves, but due to a combination of porphyria (I think) which made their hair grow, and hereditary, non-fatal rabies (which made them murderous/ravenous/faster than usual for some reason because of course it did) they were sorta/kinda werewolf-like.
Later I read a non-fiction book about rabies that said when people get it, they don’t frantically attack everybody.
A few things
#1 ‘You cannot reason somebody out of a position they did not arrive at by reason.’ I find it highly unlikely that any evidence or logic will convince these people of anything.
#2 The Beast Within- A History Of The Werewolf By Adam Douglas. While great fun to read, this book is also scholarly and extremely well researched and cited. Besides all the other great stuff, Douglas examines and demolishes the idea that ergot poisoning is responsible for myths of lycanthropy.
#3 Sailboat Silver as the weakness of werewolves is the invention of Hollywood. The legends and folktales say nothing of silver but speak of calling a werewolf by their Christian name, striking them with an iron key, drawing three drops of blood with an old dagger and other things.
I recommend you sell them arrows of lycanthropy slaying.
The “best evidence” they have is discovering a wounded man who, for some reason, confessed to being a werewolf and named his accomplices. In 1521. No mention is made of why he confessed. Was he being tortured at the time? No description of the wounds is given. Maybe the man who was attacked stabbed his attacking wolf in the belly, and found the guy with a wound on his arm - “close enough”. We don’t have any information. That’s as reliable as me telling you “yesterday I stole a million dollars from the bank, and got away with it - trust me”.
Isn’t that a redundant statement?
This is a predicament. On the one hand, it is tempting to try to turn this into a lesson in critical thinking for them. On the other hand, it’s tempting to just mock them mercilessly, and that would probably be just as effective.
What, you have a problem with churches?
Find something popular that you know they acknowledge as fiction. Not ghosts or vampires, something like Star Wars or Santa Claus. Why do we have so many stories about Jedi in some distant universe? It’s called fiction. People want to believe, so they make up stories.
Werewolves and vampires and ghosts fit a psychological niche, trying to explain evil in the world and bad things that happen in the dark. It’s projecting fears. Same thing for alien abductions, urban legends about organ thieves, and conspiracy theories about evil government agents working in secret to keep the population slaves.
So their explanation for something that is highly unbelievable and lacks evidence is yet another highly unbelievable thing that lacks evidence? Tell them to come back when they can demonstrate actual magic.
We humans are a curious lot. We take any kind of skill we can figure out and develop it to the most potential. Whether it is musical ability, athletic ability, or study of ways to manipulate the environment (e.g. fertilizer and agriculture, metallurgy, flight), we humans take anything we discover and study it and practice it and stretch it to the maximum we can get it to go. If someone actually knew how to do real magic, we would be using it to drive flying carpets or detect cancer or put out burning buildings or eradicate disease. Something. We would use magic. That’s what humans do, we use skills to change the world. Whether it’s to make the world a better place, or merely to get rich, we humans exploit anything we can to get the upper hand, to get a little leverage on the world around us and the bad shit that happens.
So either magic exists, so where is it, or else magic only exists to make werewolves - does that make any sense?
The most you can probably due for these kids is to give them some food for thought and let them grow out of it.
Why are you listing Santa in that list as if he didn’t exist? 
Along that same vein… What if your own concept/definition of ‘magic’ was incorrect?
A definition of magic that I haven’t seen mentioned here in this thread is that ‘magic is the process by which that which we do not (or can not) understand [or quantify, replicate, etc…] transpires.’ I know that I have witnessed things that were beyond my own capabilities of rationally understanding.
The proof of that is in the pudding, so to speak.
ie (albeit weak) - One may not know that an incandescent lightbulb is simply a vacuum or otherwise inert environment in which an internal filament, when ~120VAC current is applied, ‘burns’ at an appropriate temperature (K) to emit visible light.
To that person, not knowledgeable of such, it may be ‘magic’ that when one flips the switch, the room is no longer dark.
Simply taking the word of the electrician who installed the system, or an otherwise ‘knowledgeable’ individual is little different from believing a church when they say that J.C. was the son of a God, or believing an 18 year old when he says he is a werewolf.
I don’t necessarily have a horse in this race… just hoping to offer some food for thought.
While the lightbulb itself is not a good example – because any one of us can mess around with batteries and wires and get a hot red glow, anyway – sure, “magic” can be used as a catch-all for “things we don’t know yet.” But it carries such an extra freight of connotation that it isn’t the best word for the job. Is “dark matter” best explained by the word “magic?” Why not, “Stuff we don’t know about yet.” Less succinct, but more neutral and without baggage.
In some matters, we simply have to take someone else’s word. We aren’t going to repeat CERN’s discovery of the Higgs Boson. But we can do a lot of basic science right in our homes, enough to realize that we aren’t just taking it on faith. We’re standing on step one of a long stepladder that leads to CERN, but we are, at least, very firmly on that ladder. We can read science essays that carry our complete understanding upward to steps two, three, and four. With a good college education, we can go higher. Understanding the historical path of discovery from Lavoisier to Bohr to Fermi to Feynman takes much of the “faith” out of the affair.
Upon re-reading my post I did see some errors in statement, but was unable to edit in time.
To address the most egregious oversight, with regards to the lightbulb- it is obviously a measurable and reproducible experiment whereas the other examples are left to hearsay and ultimately faith.
However, I would argue that the word ‘magic’ only carries with the the connotations (baggage) one attributes to it. Connotations (beliefs) which are held in … faith (such as what a word- a series of sounds- means)
One can choose to interpret the meaning of a word in whatever context they may, though there is necessarily a component of communicability if that word is to have meaning- that others are able to understand what one’s interpreted meaning is.
Further, I don’t understand how using the phrase “stuff we don’t know about yet” implies less baggage and connotation. On the face of it, ‘yet’ implies we will someday know about it, where ‘magic’ could simply state “we don’t know”.
I am perfectly comfortable with, and often use, the phrase “I don’t know”, however, many whom I’ve encountered have, for various reasons, a predilection towards having a necessary succinct explanation of a phenomenon. IMO, ‘magic’ fits that role very well.
If I had a ladder and told you it went to heaven, but you could only stand on the first step, would you believe me?
It could simply be a really tall ladder attached to a synchronized orbiting satellite.
You, I, we believe CERN because we want to believe them. And why not…They have a good track record (as far as we know) and they have little reason to lie to us. If I recall correctly, the catholic church carried much stronger assumed infallibility for a much longer time, and we’re taught that humans believed the earth was flat for an even longer period than that.
CERN’s experiments are claimed to be reproducible, but who among us has a hadron collider to test it? Could you even legally build one?
But I digress…
It takes faith to believe in CERN, Bohr, LaVoisier, god, or the easter bunny.
It does not take faith to say “werewolves might be real, I don’t know.”
Perhaps they are able to transform via magic-(a process which we do not [or can not] understand, quantify, or replicate).
We aren’t alone; we’re part of a larger society, and that society attributes connotations to words. I, myself, might have certain personal connotations. (Jacaranda trees comfort me, because my grandmother’s house had some in the yard.) But society is the real arbiter of meanings, both central core meanings and the diffuse peripheral meanings.
Exactly; there are others involved, and we’re trying to conduct communications. It isn’t easy. I’m a white guy, and when I talk about the master-slave relationship between two hard drives in my computer, it doesn’t carry quite the same emotional tone as it might for a black man. As a Californian, I don’t blink at all when a New Zealander calls me a “Yank.” A guy from Alabama might take it very differently.
Good catch and good call. The word “yet” gave away my own unstated premise and assumption, specifically, that we are always learning and will probably know some day, even if we don’t today. This is exactly the kind of thing I was warning against, and, lo, I tumbled right into it head-first!
No… Magic connotes too much of Harry Potter and Gandalf, and Houdini, and Blackstone: Voodoo rituals and Merlin and Dr. Faustus. It connotes actual knowledge: “Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing.”
(“All must seethe and boil like lava…whilst we take five for mocha java!”)
I disagree, or, perhaps, I agree, but only in the trivial sense that it takes faith to believe in reality, the laws of cause and effect, the existence of other people, etc. Any rejection of solipsism takes an initial leap of faith. But if you believe in, say, Adelaide, Australia (or some other city you’ve never been to) it isn’t by “faith.” It’s by the extension of knowledge past that of our own senses.
True. But such a statement is vacuous. It contains no real meaning. “Ghosts might be real. Demons might be real. Shakespeare’s plays might have been written by Henry Purcell. The woman you always thought was your mother might be a robot duplicate put in place by aliens.” Anything “might be.” There is no way to falsify such a claim.
You seem to be referring to Clarke’s Law. I don’t wish to engage in your sophistry. I do not choose to use the word “magic” as a synonym for my own ignorance.
My point was that if werewolves existed, we would have captured them, dissected them, gene sequenced them, and used them to find a cure for baldness. Or something. We’d have been looking for an effective cure, a werewolf “antibiotics” if you will. Or a werewolf vaccine. Some way to stop it, to prevent it, to make it go away. Or else legislation about the penalties of not constraining yourself during the full moon, or whatever. We have specific legislation regarding drinking and driving, we would have specific legislation regarding the penalties for “wolfing out” and hurting someone. What about liability for biting someone and turning them into a werewolf? Can you be sued over that?
Real magic would have applications and embedded features into society. We would find a way to make it useful, not leave it to aging hippies to dance around bonfires in the buff.
Or maybe both! Any excuse to dance around a bonfire in the buff, eh?
But, definitely, yes. The times are no longer when the kind of secrecy exists, as would be required by true “arcana.” H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man learned that: just being invisible isn’t enough these days. Sleeman and the breaking of the Thugs in India is another example: the secret society endured for a long time, but it couldn’t survive in the era of telegraphy and detailed police work.
The modern effort to track down reincarnated souls is an interesting example. Whether or not one believes in reincarnation, the scientific approach to the matter is admirable. It’s an organized way of looking at the real evidence, and assessing it empirically. This is capital-G Good. It is the best way we know of to learn the truth.
And it doesn’t require faith. It is the antithesis of faith. It’s Doubting Thomas. It’s the Citizenry of Missouri. (The “Show Me” State.)