Do You Believe in Magic?
As a young fellow, like a lot of young fellows, I saved up and purchased a set of magic tricks from a magazine ad I saw. I admired magicians, who were able to use sleight of hand tricks and misdirection to fool an audience. Sadly, as with the juggling instruction book I also purchased, I did not apply myself seriously to learning how to do those mind-fooling tricks. However, I did learn enough to be able to detect the tricks used by many magicians and figure out how they managed to deceive their audiences.
Later, as I was struggling with a fading belief in deities and such supernatural matters, I saw a parallel to my brief study of magic tricks. I began to see the misdirection and sleight of language that was being used by ministers and preachers to deceive a different sort of audience. Lacking evidence, they shifted their audience's attention away from the real and managed to convince people that the unreal was somehow more real that reality. It was a nifty trick that successfully fooled a sizable percentage of those who saw it.
I was unable to see it, however, and became less an less able to see it as I began to learn more about the physical world I found myself inhabiting. Science attracted my curious mind, and I learned how the scientific method put all theories to the test of fallibility. If a result could not be duplicated by more than one scientist, it failed that test. I liked that idea. Try things out. Demonstrate the validity of what you claim with evidence of the truth of your claim.
Religion could not do that. It simply could not. It said that "faith" was the evidence of things unseen. Nope. I couldn't buy that at all. Evidence can be seen. Evidence can be examined in real ways. "Faith" is evidence of nothing but faith, I determined. And that's a tautology. That something is said in the Bible is not evidence of anything but words written down. Before long, I simply could no longer believe that which had no first-level physical evidence. I was an atheist, I discovered.
Was that a bad thing? I couldn't see that it was. I still had a solid moral and ethical compass that was common to most cultures. The only difference between me and the religious folks around me, really, was belief in deities or a deity. I didn't have that. I couldn't have that. Did that change me? No, not really. Not at all.
I don't believe in magic. I cannot. I can see the tricks being performed, but with investigation, I can understand how they fool the eye and the mind. Nope. Magic is trickery. It's fun to watch, but is not real.
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