Is there a supernatural side to reality? Is there any such thing as magic? Do miracles occur? In the strictest sense of the definition of those words, no. No real magic, no real miracles. There is just science that we understand, and science that hopefully we will eventually understand, assuming that we stay on the Path of Knowledge.
Having said that, there's also a looser definition of magic and miracles that is in common use. It is a reflection of wonderment and amazement. It can refer to things that appear to be magical and mystical yet aren't. For example to me a cell phone is an almost magical device. I can voice command my phone to dial up people on the other side of the planet and talk to them over this little wireless box in my hand. Every time I fly in an airplane it amazes me that something so huge and heavy can fly through the air. The Tree of Knowledge amazes me. That the human race can come together and produce all of this stuff requiring an amazing amount of organization, and that we can act like a hive of bees without the common person having any idea that the very language of the thoughts in your brain, was invented by other people. To be that linked in to the group mindset, without any awareness of that, is miraculous to me.
What most people call Magic and Miracles are things and events that they can't explain.
Computers are almost magical to me. When you think about it, what is a microprocessor? It's imprinted silicon. It is a rock. We could say that we have developed the technology to make rocks think, and we wouldn't be entirely wrong. We are at a time when evolution has taken us to the point of self realization, and we can now choose what we will become. We are in an age of great wonderment, an age where reality is more amazing than it has ever been. Why would anyone want to give up reality for a fiction based existence?
So - for those of you hard core realists who might be cringing right now worried that the Church of Reality is going to go off the deep end, that's not going to happen. I'm not diluting reality by talking about miracles and magic in this context. I'm actually somewhat diluting the concept of magic and miracles themselves, because what most people call a miracle is just something they can't explain with science. Not that it's unexplainable, but from their perspective it is.
I think it's a miracle that no one had already come up with a Church of Reality until now.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, I knew that magicians used tricks to create illusions. Illusions that looked magical. At that time, it seemed that more adults believed in real magic. They may have known that magicians didn't have powers, but still believed that there were people and/or beings that do. There is still a lot of that today, but I do think that the number of realists have increased. Many people are still confused about the difference between the unexplained and the unexplainable. And sometimes it's fun to play with that misunderstanding and make supernatural claims just to get people to think about it. As always, thinking is a good thing and this will probably start some lively debate.
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