[Buddha-l] Re: Magic

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Joy Vriens schreef:
> Technology concerns the links between material events. Magic, as you say, consists in manipulating things called people by means of rituals and witchcraft. With technology we can produce the most awesome arms. With magic we can manipulate the citizens of a country to actually use those arms on others and through witchcraft and rituals we can actually get the younger citizens to hurl them at them. Cause and effect. The magic worked thousands of years ago, the same magic still works nowadays. 
It doesn't, Joy, that's the problem. You can go to a christian science 
meeting or have your cakras healed, but at the end of the day you still 
have the same symptoms, only surgery or medication helps. Tibetan Lama's 
know this, they claim to be expert magicians, but revert to western 
medicine if they're really ill. Even if you consider the advertisements 
and spindoctors the magicians of today, they cannot turn the Irak war 
into a succes, they tried to magically create weapons of massdestruction 
over there, but it turned out to be impossible. If magic worked we would 
have had planes and computers thousands of years ago.
> Cause and effect never fail. 
Magic and witchcraft work by association of ideas, not by causality.
> If you look back, those in power have always been assisted by magicians, tantric wizzards, mandarins, cardinals, propaganda wizzards and spin wizzards. 
And failed. Every general could tell you that. Maybe Macchiavelli can 
convince you.
> Technology is a detail. Ok you need it to make clay pots and to sharpen your stones to produce arrows. But magic deals with what really matters and what really happens in our lifes. It shapes our opinions, our wishes and dreams. And we wish and dream what those magicians want us to wish and dream.
>   
Read Marx, or Bauman, or Virillo, or Baudrillard or McLuan and learn. 
Many a war has been won by technology, for example the Chinese didn't 
have anything to touch the British iron steamboats sailing up the 
Yangtse river.
> The wizzards of the NRA can tell you all about the magic of worshipping a hand gun and the feeling of safety and commuinion with ones *real* compatriots and with the founding fathers (ancestors) it procures. The ancestor cult has real causes and effects.
>   
Yes, the Iranese children in the war against Irak thought they were 
invincible, because they were protected by Allah, but ...oops. How sad, 
belief doesn't stop bullets!

-- 


Erik


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