You really start to realize that people saw "magic" in a different way in ancient times when you read a story about early Christians and the thing everyone is upset and arguing about isn't can the Christians do magic, of course they can do magic lots o...
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You really start to realize that people saw "magic" in a different way in ancient times when you read a story about early Christians and the thing everyone is upset and arguing about isn't can the Christians do magic, of course they can do magic lots of people can... it's if their magic is better or not.
Yeah throw your staff down and it becomes a snake. Big deal we can do that too.
I guess to some degree magic was just... technology?
@futurebird “magick” used to just mean knowledge, and encompased everything we would currently call magick along with what we would call medicine, science, chemistry, psychology, meteorology, astronomy and so forth;
the meaning began to shift to our modern understanding of being something wicked or supernatural as an evolution across the crusades, the inquisitions, the witch hunts, and finally the enlightenment really as a way of identifying “the bad people we need to kill”- the things they were doing witch hunts over was just predicting weather and contraceptives
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"oh yeah, these people just had no ability to fact-check anything that happened more than a few miles away"
(the background music swells ominously-- certainly we will not rue the day we uttered such words with confidence in our ability to check the facts.)
The internet is the tower of babel.
We wanted to make a global village, all of human knowledge free to all people. Every new discovery cross-referenced and incorporated into one edifice ... and the scientific and technological power that comes with such a unification of human understanding.
But, God was annoyed by the success and confused our languages and fragmented us into "bubbles" each with their own "truth" and not one of them as lofty as what we dreamed of building.
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The internet is the tower of babel.
We wanted to make a global village, all of human knowledge free to all people. Every new discovery cross-referenced and incorporated into one edifice ... and the scientific and technological power that comes with such a unification of human understanding.
But, God was annoyed by the success and confused our languages and fragmented us into "bubbles" each with their own "truth" and not one of them as lofty as what we dreamed of building.
Desperately trying to convince everyone we should stop being upset about suddenly all speaking different languages and spend some time learning each others languages each evening and get back to building the awesome tower to heaven.
We don't need to give up just because it's harder to communicate! We can overcome this!
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"oh yeah, these people just had no ability to fact-check anything that happened more than a few miles away"
(the background music swells ominously-- certainly we will not rue the day we uttered such words with confidence in our ability to check the facts.)
@futurebird I'd like to think I'm vaguely more able to fact-check things that happen in other places, but I'd also like to think I'm capable of folding laundry the same day it comes out of the dryer.
In this case I'd argue I have more theoretical fact-checking capabilities than a medieval monk, but practically using them might prove difficult. If I have time, money, and transport, I *can* go to the zoo and see critters for myself—the monk didn't have a zoo to visit. -
@futurebird I'd like to think I'm vaguely more able to fact-check things that happen in other places, but I'd also like to think I'm capable of folding laundry the same day it comes out of the dryer.
In this case I'd argue I have more theoretical fact-checking capabilities than a medieval monk, but practically using them might prove difficult. If I have time, money, and transport, I *can* go to the zoo and see critters for myself—the monk didn't have a zoo to visit.@pandabutter @futurebird Speaking of which, I am endlessly fascinated at how good Dürer's depiction of a rhinoceros was in 1515 despite apparently never having seen one - it's very clearly a rhino - but also how wrong it was too.
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@pandabutter @futurebird Speaking of which, I am endlessly fascinated at how good Dürer's depiction of a rhinoceros was in 1515 despite apparently never having seen one - it's very clearly a rhino - but also how wrong it was too.
@JonnyT @pandabutter @futurebird there was a rhino in Lisbon in 1515, so presumably Dürer heard first hand reports (it unfortunately drowned while being transported by ship). Two centuries later, Clara toured Europe and painters finally got to see the real thing.
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You really start to realize that people saw "magic" in a different way in ancient times when you read a story about early Christians and the thing everyone is upset and arguing about isn't can the Christians do magic, of course they can do magic lots of people can... it's if their magic is better or not.
Yeah throw your staff down and it becomes a snake. Big deal we can do that too.
I guess to some degree magic was just... technology?
Even now; there is a bit in the Catholic confession ritual where penitents are supposed to apologize for consulting fortune tellers or anyone who professes to be able to predict the future by supernatural means.
Not because those are frauds, but because the Church considers them as competition.
"by supernatural means" having been added because the Catholic hierarchy does acknowledge weather forecasts etc.
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Even now; there is a bit in the Catholic confession ritual where penitents are supposed to apologize for consulting fortune tellers or anyone who professes to be able to predict the future by supernatural means.
Not because those are frauds, but because the Church considers them as competition.
"by supernatural means" having been added because the Catholic hierarchy does acknowledge weather forecasts etc.
@michael_w_busch @futurebird that’s the cowards way out, clearly the Vatican needs to start their own competing weather forecasting service
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@michael_w_busch @futurebird that’s the cowards way out, clearly the Vatican needs to start their own competing weather forecasting service
For a long time they had ALL the cool science worth knowing ... at least in that region of the world. Not so much now.
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I think saying "the other gods were just demons" is a cop out.
People really don't read the Bible at all do they?
@futurebird @regordane i've been inclined to understand 1 cor 10:20 https://biblehub.com/interlinear/1_corinthians/10-20.htm as saying the pagan gods are *merely* spirits, a more powerful and fundamentally different sort of created being, but still a created being rather than *the* primordial self-sufficient Being itself
like you were tending a stray fat-bottomed major thinking it was a queen -
@futurebird @regordane i've been inclined to understand 1 cor 10:20 https://biblehub.com/interlinear/1_corinthians/10-20.htm as saying the pagan gods are *merely* spirits, a more powerful and fundamentally different sort of created being, but still a created being rather than *the* primordial self-sufficient Being itself
like you were tending a stray fat-bottomed major thinking it was a queen"like you were tending a stray fat-bottomed major thinking it was a queen"
Thank you for putting this into terms I can easily understand!
