Conreligions Checklist: Magic, Politics, Science

     Magic

• Religion and magic often skate very close to each other, however ...
• ... so did science and magic back in really old times.
• ... the differentiation between religion and magic is not necessarily all that clear.
• both are (or at least 'can be') supernatural practices, in some sense.
• not all cultures necessarily differentiate them!
• however, a distinction between sanctioned and non-sanctioned magical activities is rather likely to exist. 
• ... the differentiation between magic and science/engineering is not necessarily all that clear.
• Depending on how science develops, it too will be about
• causing effects
  
• explaining cause and effect
• developing a terminology that permits discussing things
• Practitioners of engineering may not necessarily understand the underlying science, and in the modern world, we do see a fair share of people whose understanding of science is basically just a substitute for religion. (I am not saying science is a substitute for religion, but if you reason about science in certain ways, your understanding of it is probably not much better than religion. Consider, e.g. someone who thinks that evolution has an explicit purpose, or that e.g. quantum mechanics proves that your attitude to outcomes of random events can influence them, etc.) 
• Practitioners of engineering thus may end up using formulas for calculating whether a bridge will hold a certain mass as a sort of magic incantation that tells something essential about the bridge.
  
• ... both religious rituals and magic contain an idea of causation that differs from a naturalistic idea of causation; however, medieval magic did assume quite a different idea of causation in the first place.
• If you don't understand where language came from, language might be seen as an essential, objective part of nature (rather than as a human phenomenon); if language is understood as such a part of nature (or rather physics), ... then linguistic acts might well be "naturalistically" thought to affect nature. Reality 'hears' what you're saying, and reacts to it. However, maybe your language is considered degenerate for whatever reason, and therefore less efficient.
• We find some modern people too have strange notions of causation, see e.g. Masaru Emoto
  
• This actually leads to an interesting notion of what the term "magic" might mean in modern times: "magic" is a term used for any system that assumes an outdated or otherwise rejected notion of causality!
   
• European and Middle Eastern Magic had several different forms, not necessarily recognized as branches of a single 'magic':
  
• The conjuration of spirits
• More generally, things that have effects on spirits in various ways - mazes by that made their obsessive minds get stuck, etc.
  
• Altering the properties of a thing more directly by carrying out certain actions (amulets and talismans)
• Utilizing the properties of a thing by carrying out certain actions
• "As abo
• In most of human history, religion and the state have been two legs of the same creature - the narratives and rituals of religion have justified and regulated the state, and the state has sponsored and sanctioned religion. A few religions, however, have become 'superstate' religions, i.e. their reach crosses state borders and can impose political clout onto several of them - this is maybe especially clear in pre-colonial India, post-Roman Europe and the modern world.
• ve, so below" - by doing something here, the order in the heavens is affected; the order here, is further affected in accordance with how it's affected above.
• Some of these did have somewhat reasonable assumptions:
• We can see that tides are affected by the sun and the moon; thus, the sun and the moon clearly have some kind of invisibly transmitted effect. From this, a mistaken understanding of what that effect is may easily lead into a variety of notions of magic. However! This misunderstood notion probably is not all that far from the roots of our understanding of invisible forces either. NB: I wrote roots, not implying that our understanding and theirs is similar, but that there is a historical continuity from one to the other.
  
• Is prayer magic?
• Depends on what prayer is supposed to achieve.
• Consider the Jewish notion that prayer should be an activity where you consider your own conduct and judge yourself and commit yourself to improving.
• OTOH, Jewish prayer also contains appeals to G-d to improve situations in the real world.
• The atheist view on what religious people do prayer for is is often rather lopsided towards 'people asking for stuff'. Prayer tends to have many functions:
• praise
• restatement and affirmation of doctrine
• personal commitment to improvement
• something somewhat like 'meditation'
• communal bonding
• this may include teaching and reinforcing beliefs among the community's members (e.g. a leader of the congregation prays aloud, and everyone else hears this and possibly repeats it)
• of course, this may also contain an aspect of curtailing freedom of thought - "you've confirmed, vocally, that you believe this every day your entire life, so why won't you believe it now?")
  
• ineffable things (silent prayer, prayer as music without lyrics (hassidic niggun)) - this does probably work as some kind of emotional vent

Science

• Scientific terminology is by itself not necessarily "true": if a religion by tradition uses a word to denote a class of things, and science uses the same word to denote a slightly different class, this is not necessarily a disagreement. It is merely the use of separate definitions. This is a normal phenomenon, and even scientists use words differently - ask a cosmologist and a metallurgist whether sulphur is a metal. Words are arbitrary labels that we apply to things, and sometimes, two groups have different use cases for these words.
• However, both sides of this coin may disagree with the idea that words are arbitrary, and see any failure to adhere to specific definitions as 'wrong'.
• Thus, imho, whenever an atheist use arguments like 'bats aren't birds yet the Bible thinks they are', I'd really like to tell him in private that his argument is making us atheists look dumb, and that he should know better - a language may well have a word 'bird' that basically includes all warm-blooded winged animals. We don't actually know the exact meaning of 'bird' in KJV-era English!
• However, the same type of arguments coming from a religious person is just as dumb. If a muslim argues that science is wrong since it doesn't agree that the liver is a kind of blood, ... well, 
  
• Thus, the terms by themselves don't hold truth value, they're merely a label. Yes, scientific terms often try to catch some kind of relatedness between concepts, ... but this is again dictated by use-case.
• Thus, disagreements as to whether something is a fruit or a berry, a fish or a mammal, etc, ... might occur, but this would be the result of either a religious group or a counter-religious group trying to impose one use terminologal use case onto the entire language, sometimes even onto every language.
  
• Some religions have narratives, rules or other conceptions of reality that go against objective reality. Science attempts to figure out something that is close to reality. If scientific findings and religious dogma contradict, this may lead to the kind of conflict we see in some circles w.r.t creationism, but it may also
• Cause reinterpretation in all kinds of mystical / metaphorical ways.
• Cause rejection of a narrative.
• Cause the believers to think they don't "understand" the narrative deeply enough.
• Cause believers to hold out hope that scientific findings currently are a fluke, and soon enough the True Truth will emerge.
• If the religion isn't all that interested in maintaining belief, but rather maintaining praxis, this might not be an issue at all ... unless scientific findings show that the praxis leads to the opposite results of what's expected (e.g. a healing ritual that is strongly carcinogenic).
• Sometimes, people are able to keep conflicting ideas in their heads, and if they do not perceive the conflict between the ideas to be important, this might not even lead to particularly strong cognitive dissonance. I know I have some conflicting beliefs w.r.t. some obscure maths, but it's not anything that gives me any stress.
• Consider examples like 'reconstructionist Judaism', which holds that Judaism is an iron age civilization that has survived into the present by morphing from a territorial civilization to an ethnic minority group kind of civilization. For such an idea about 'religion', the truth value of the religious scripture is really not all that important: to them, the Jewish Bible is a family hierloom which tells them how some particularly influential members of the civilization viewed itself and its challenges 2200+ years ago, and this volume has had a considerable impact on the culture, which is another reason to keep it around and sometimes even read it. For such a religion, the science/religion conflict seems totally irrelevant. For conservative Christianity, Islam and some branches of Orthodox Judaism, however, the conflict can be all the more threatening, as cherished truths are questioned and possibly even shown to be entirely untenable (or only tenable by extremely far-fetched solutions).
  

Politics

• A common notion today is "keep religion out of politics". Over most of human history, this would be almost laughable.
  
• Clearly, if divine beings exist and interact with mankind, pleasing them may be of some political relevance.
• As previously mentioned, in earlier times, causation was less clearly understood, and if your best understanding of causation says 'we need to sacrifice sheep to ensure rain', your culture will sacrifice sheep.
• Organized religion almost certainly emerged not as a result of politics, but as politics.
  
• Democracy in some sense does imply imposing by some kind of regulated manner, the ethics of some voters onto other voters. If some voters' ethics are based on religion, it's not weird if this does impose some religious values on the non-religious as well.
  
• In most of human history, religion and the state have been two legs of the same creature - the narratives and rituals of religion have justified and regulated the state, and the state has sponsored and sanctioned religion. A few religions, however, have become 'superstate' religions, i.e. their reach crosses state borders and can impose political clout onto several of them - this is maybe especially clear in pre-colonial India, post-Roman Europe and the modern world.
• Pre-state or sub-state religions naturally also exist, but also require some amount of social cooperation. And in these, there also tends to be justification of the social order - chieftains, shamans, gender roles, etc. And this, of course, is politics.